


not creepin', just stuck

by a_gay_poster



Series: donut shop fics [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Donut Shop, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Tattoos, Comedy of Errors, Crack Treated Seriously, First Dates, First Kiss, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:07:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: And now here they were, squeezed into a cozy little corner booth at therealcoffee shop just up the street. The one with the blackboard menu and overstuffed upholstery on the mismatched chairs and a barista who, Gaara noticed with no small amount of jealousy, was neither required to wear a nametag nor recite a pithy canned slogan before each order.Or, the inevitable consequences of being stuck in a donut case together.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Series: donut shop fics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1905994
Comments: 24
Kudos: 120





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whazzername](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whazzername/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Whazz! I hope this fits the bill for 'what happens after the meet-cute'. (The answer, as you'll discover, is 'a comedy of errors'.) I hope your birthday is full of all the best/worst puns, delicious recipes, and Appy and Pappy! 
> 
> **Warnings:** depictions of needles (tattoo), blood (in small quantities), minor injuries, mild whorephobic language, vague discussion of mental health, descriptions of violence, discussion of scars/chronic pain/past severe injuries. 
> 
> This is the sequel to the story where Lee gets caught in a donut case ([not stuck, just creepin'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18243050)), so you might want to read that first to understand what's going on.
> 
> Thank you to [EgregiousDerp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EgregiousDerp) for helping me hash this into readability. Everything funny in this story was their idea.

Gaara closed the door behind him with a sigh and tossed his visor on the kitchen table. Its embroidered donut logo stared back at him like a baleful eye. 

“How was your first day of work?” Temari looked over her shoulder from where she stood at the kitchen counter, sorting through their mail. The kitchen was warm from the oven; something cloyingly sweet was baking, and the smell made Gaara a little nauseous. 

“Fine,” he said dully, drifting to the cabinet for a cup and then the freezer for the ice cube tray. The noise when he cracked it against the counter to loosen the cubes was startlingly loud. The cup rattled and threatened to fall. 

He caught it at the last second. However, in so doing he upended the tray, sending ice cubes skittering around the kitchen floor and under the fridge like deranged ice dancers. 

Temari gave him a long-suffering look. 

“I’ll get a towel.” 

Once they were kneeling side-by-side on the linoleum, Temari wiping up the rapidly melting ice and Gaara swiping under the fridge with a broom to try and excavate the last few cubes, she turned to him. 

“Was everyone nice to you?”

Gaara bristled instinctively. It was the sort of question you’d ask a child after their first day at kindergarten. He squinted at her, but bit his tongue before he snapped and said something he’d regret. The gentle coaxing and kid gloves were, after all, probably something he needed. And even if they weren’t, the question was part of Temari’s show of care. The part-time job was itself part of his ‘treatment’, a concession to normalcy suggested by his therapist to structure his day and, ideally, help reset his sleep schedule. 

So far it hadn’t worked. He’d spent the night before his first shift staring blankly at the cracks in his bedroom ceiling, nebulous anxieties forming tumbleweeds in his mind. 

“Everyone was nice,” Gaara acceded, getting back to his feet with a groan. Temari didn’t wait for him to offer to pull her up; she knew better, with the shape his shoulder was still in, even after years of physical therapy and acupuncture treatments and medications that did little but blunt the sharp edges of his pain. 

At least the warmth of the kitchen air helped. He leaned on the broom for a moment, rolling his shoulder to loosen it. 

“Good. They’d better be.” Temari brushed the floor’s dust off on her trouser legs. “Muffin?”

Gaara declined. 

The sisterly interrogation quickly became part of his post-shift routine. He’d return to find Temari in the kitchen—she was able to do the bulk of her job remotely, and so rarely went into the office—and she’d ask him the same things every day. 

Over time, he opened up to her gentle prying. That was the thing about Temari: she was patient, with a wicked intuition for any sign of weakness. It made her a lethal businesswoman … and an intimidating person to share a house with. She seemed to know intuitively when Gaara was ready to submit to further questioning about his day. 

He told her about his boss, Tenten, and her roommate, the assistant shift manager, Neji, and how he suspected there was something more to their relationship than ‘just’ roommates. He told her about the weak coffee and how the smell of stale sugar bothered his nose. He told her when he was overwhelmed by training on too many processes at once; that the minute fluctuations in the baking times for the various types of donuts vexed him more than the fact that he kept dropping rolls of quarters when he tried to crack them into the cash register. He even told her about the polyester corporate uniform and how it chafed at his bare skin, to which she’d wisely suggested he wear an undershirt. 

Then she started adding more questions to the afternoon routine, slowly drawing him into something that was less stilted question-and-answer and more like a real conversation.

“And how are the customers?” she asked him for the first time, chopping a bar of chocolate into chunks. 

“They’re fine.” Then he paused. He had, perhaps for the first time, something other than a direct answer to give. “There’s one …” 

“One?” Temari set down her knife on the cutting board with intimidating precision. “Who do I need to kill?” 

“Nobody,” he said quickly. “He’s my boss’s roommate.”

“I thought your boss’s roommate also worked with you?”

He shook his head. “Her other roommate.” 

“Oh,” she said. “And?” 

“He remembered my name.” 

Very few customers took the time to learn Gaara’s name, and when they did, they used it with a kind of possession. Squinting at his nametag then dragging their eyes up his face before repeating it as they placed their order. Like they owned him, or worse. 

He didn’t dare mention to his sister the only other regular who remembered his name without reading the tag, the woman who propped her chin on her hands so her chest was on display, who seemed utterly impervious to his monotone reminders that he needed to get back to work. Tenten had chased her from the store just last Tuesday, all false cheer and ‘have a wonderful day, _ma’am_ ’, before turning around, scowling and muttering something about _cougars_. Gaara didn’t think the woman had resembled a large cat at all. Maybe something more harrowing than that. A dragon breathing fire, perhaps, and he without his armor. 

The one other person who came close to recalling his name was an older woman who came in weekly for a cake donut and what she called ‘fancy coffee’ (it was just a latte with sugar syrup, but Gaara wasn’t about to tell her any different). She called him ‘Gary’ and kept trying to pinch his cheeks. At least she only went for the ones on his face. He knew he had chipmunk cheeks, if only because the rest of his features were very small, but that didn’t mean they were up for grabs to just anyone. He used to be able to frighten people off with just a stare, but now that his lizardlike glower had been worn down to something softer and more exhausted, it seemed people felt they could just talk to or touch him whenever they wanted. 

Tenten’s roommate—the one who wasn’t Neji—didn’t do any of that though. He didn’t preside over his orders like he had a right to Gaara’s personhood, and he didn’t try to chat Gaara up or encroach upon his space or time. The first time he came in, he asked Gaara for his name instead of reading it off his nametag, and then he stuck his hand over the counter to shake. Which, yeah, was a little weird, but it was also … oddly charming. To say nothing of the megawatt smile he turned on when Gaara reached out and shook his hand back. 

He didn’t even _eat_ donuts, which Gaara imagined had something to do with the fact that he was almost always in running shoes and slightly sweat-damp t-shirts (or once, Gaara recalled with an uneven thump of his heart restarting, skintight long-sleeved underarmor). He hadn’t even been in the store to order food the first time they met; he’d come to drop something off that Tenten had left at their apartment, bustling in and tossing it to her before jogging back towards the door. 

He’d hardly looked up at all until Gaara had cleared his throat and asked if he’d like to order anything, in perfect corporate drone style. And then he’d frozen—as in, actually halted mid-action with his mouth open and his hand in the air, like he was playing a game of freeze tag and had just been tagged out—and it seemed to take a minute for his brain to start him moving again to tell Gaara ‘no thank you’. He was extremely polite. In a sort of dorky way. Gaara imagined that if they’d gone to school together, they wouldn’t have gotten along—Gaara would have bullied him horribly—but Gaara had learned to appreciate awkward earnestness in his young adulthood. It was certainly preferable to cold indifference or greasy smarm. 

The store’s coffee sucked, but Tenten’s roommate had showed up every day like clockwork since then, ordering a single cup of watery black coffee to-go and only ever stopping to chat if Gaara actually had the time and there wasn’t a line. There was a sort of careful consideration about him, an awareness of other people and their feelings that made Gaara feel things that were too warm and fuzzy to verbally identify. 

He couldn’t say any of that, of course. So instead what he said was:

“He’s … nice.” 

Temari smiled with a softness that looked very unpracticed on her face. “That’s good. You could use a little ‘nice’.” 

It became something of a gentle teasing. Gaara would come home, take off his visor, and Temari would ask him if ‘Mr. Nice’ came in that day. 

The answer was almost always ‘yes’. And slowly, like the potted mint on his windowsill creeping above the soil, he began to open up more and more. 

“What’s this Mr. Nice look like, anyway?” she asked him, on an afternoon when Gaara had, in typical fashion, managed to trip over one of his own shoelaces with such force it tore. Now he sat at the kitchen table, painstakingly mending it. 

“He has a name, you know,” he muttered to Kankuro’s garish embroidery thread, pinching the needle hard. “It’s Lee.”

“Lee,” she echoed, fingernails tap-tap-tapping on the glass of the oven timer. “I’ll remember that.” 

Though she seemed to forget it immediately, because after Gaara’s curt description, the moniker ‘Mr. Nice’ became ‘Mr. Tall, Dark, and Nice.’ 

And then came the day that he’d arrived at work to find Lee stuck in the donut case. Followed shortly by Gaara himself becoming lodged in the donut case. Concluded by a mortifying extraction process that had with Tenten lecturing the whole assemblage of her employees and roommates on the finer points of screwdrivers and WD-40. 

And now here they were, squeezed into a cozy little corner booth at the _real_ coffee shop just up the street. The one with the blackboard menu and overstuffed upholstery on the mismatched chairs and a barista who, Gaara noticed with no small amount of jealousy, was neither required to wear a nametag nor recite a pithy canned slogan before each order.

He ducked behind the tabletop—which was inlaid with postcards of various places Gaara would never be able to afford to travel—and wrestled his polyester uniform shirt up over his head. It took his visor with it, and he wrapped the whole neon monstrosity into a shameful little bundle, half-sitting on it. When he looked up, roughly finger-combing his hair and brushing the wrinkles out of the white undershirt that he was glad Temari had suggested he wear, Lee was staring at him. 

There was a faint, high blush on Lee’s cheeks. 

His mouth was open in the same way it had been the first day he had nearly stumbled over his own two feet to introduce himself. He opened and closed it once before seeming to shake himself. 

“Um,” Lee said. “I can go order for us. What would you like?”

Gaara glanced up at the handwritten menu. It had been drawn in chalk, clearly by someone who had more interest in making the lettering impressive than in making it legible. Every item he _could_ discern sounded over-sweet. 

“Double espresso. Plain.”

“But it’s almost noon!” Lee’s eyes were wide and dark, and they grew all the wider with his expression of horror. 

Gaara snorted through his nose. “I’ll live.” 

“Right.” Lee nodded, his mouth and his large eyebrows conspiring to furrow his expression into something very serious. He started to march for the counter, but then he hesitated. “Are you sure that’s all you want? You don’t want any food or anything? It didn’t seem like you had the chance to eat earlier, since you came in late. Uh—” He gulped. “—I could. Sort of feel your stomach growling.” 

The very tips of Gaara’s ears felt suddenly warm. He resisted the urge to scrub at them or jam his loathsome visor back over his head to hide them. 

“Just the coffee.” He nearly choked on the words. 

Lee didn’t press the issue. He just hurried away to join the queue. 

Gaara fiddled idly with his phone. Temari hadn’t texted him just yet, and the tightness in his shoulder was getting worse. He could feel the muscle fibers tangling with each other, the tension building and forming a hard knot in the soft flesh beneath his shoulder blade. 

At least the view was nice. 

Lee was wearing bright green running tights under his shorts. They clung to every curve of his calves and thighs, somehow more revealing than bare skin. And the shorts were … well. They weren’t inappropriately short, exactly, but they were a far cry from the shapeless, baggy things his brother sometimes forced him into for what he called ‘jogging’, but what in reality was mostly just meandering around the public park with a vape pen in the corner of his mouth. Gaara hated exercise, but he would be willing to learn to like it if it meant Lee would wear _that_. Lee’s shorts ended well above the knee, and the black fabric looked like it would feel silky if Gaara ran it through his fingers. The desire to test his theory was almost too much to stand. Lee’s thighs beneath the shorts’ hems were broad and thickly muscled. Like he could crush watermelons with them. Or heads. 

Gaara had to look back down at his phone to keep his ears from getting any redder. 

He startled when ceramic clattered on the tabletop, but then looked up to see a broad smile and shiny hair. 

Lee had plates and cups lined up all along the length of his arm. Either he’d purchased himself a personal feast, or he’d completely ignored Gaara’s request for just coffee. 

“I’m sorry. I know you said you didn’t want anything, but breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

“It’s almost noon,” Gaara mimicked Lee’s earlier outburst, looking up without moving his head, a sarcastic little glance from under the fringe of his hair. 

“You seemed like you didn’t like sweet things, so I got you a bacon sandwich.” The plate he set in front of Gaara was shiny with grease, stacked high with thick, buttered bread and crisp meat. Beyond the pain in his shoulder sapping his interest in eating, Gaara hadn’t wanted to make presumptions by ordering something too expensive. Apparently he needn’t have worried, because Lee was still unloading food onto the tiny table. 

He leaned towards his sandwich and sniffed. It smelled like the kind of food that stuck to your ribs, all smokiness and too much oil. 

His stomach growled. 

“Apparently they have the most amazing pancakes here!” Lee, finally unburdened, sat down in his seat with a smile and began unwrapping his silverware. 

“They have pancakes? At a coffee shop?” 

“There’s a little kitchen in the back, the barista was telling me. Apparently one of their managers is a trainee chef, and he ...” Lee continued on merrily and at length, beaming and gesticulating and completely ignoring his food. Gaara just sat there quietly, taking it all in. 

That was another thing Gaara had noticed about Lee in his brief observations, something he admired. A certain ease he had with slipping into conversation with just about anyone. A natural interest in other people’s lives that led to them opening up, just as he’d slowly pried back the hard edges of Gaara’s personality. 

Gaara took a small, hesitant bite of his sandwich. It might have been the best thing he’d ever tasted. The bread was just toasted on the outside and wonderfully soft in the middle, the bacon the perfect combination of crunch and gristle. He chewed, swallowed, and was unable to resist taking another bite. In just moments, the sandwich was nearly gone. 

He looked up to find Lee staring at him, chin pillowed in his hand. 

“What?” Gaara swallowed, licking the grease from his lips. 

“Nothing!” Lee yelped. “I’m just … glad to see you enjoying your food! That’s all.” He ducked his head and grabbed his fork. 

“It’s good,” Gaara said quietly. “Thanks.” 

Head still bowed, Lee dug into his food with characteristic panache. 

“Mmm!” he said a moment later, around a mouthful of sticky syrup and fried dough. “Are you sure you don’t want to try these?”

Gaara didn’t care for sweet things. He was a bitter person and that reflected in his choice of foods as much as his personality. But Lee … he made sweetness seem tempting. 

He tipped his chin. Lee wasted no time in pulling Gaara’s plate to his and quickly divvying his meal so that, when he pushed it back to Gaara’s side of the table, there was a whole pancake sitting in the center of it, just as heavily laden with syrup and whipped cream and sliced fruit as Lee’s was. 

It was a lot to take in. 

Not just the pancake, though Gaara suspected that would be a hurdle too, if he didn’t want to seem rude. But the generosity, the eagerness to share, the light in Lee’s eyes as he gestured with his fork and knife and grinned to encourage Gaara to take a bite. 

Gaara didn’t have a fork; he’d been eating a sandwich. So he just pulled a piece off the pancake’s sticky edge with his fingers, stuck it in his mouth, and chewed. 

It was sweet. Cloyingly so. It didn’t taste very good, but the look on Lee’s face was such that Gaara found himself entranced. Distracted, so that when he reached to take another bite, if only so Lee’s smile wouldn’t falter, he hardly noticed that he upended his coffee cup into his plate. 

It was only the slow dripping of coffee overflowing the plate’s bounds and slapping to the tabletop that alerted him to his misstep. 

“Oh no, it’s ruined!” Lee’s small mouth crumpled into an exaggerated pout. “Do you want the other one?” 

Gaara looked at his coffee-sodden plate, then at Lee’s. Lee had only one pancake left. _Lee_ had actually been enjoying his food. Gaara had only been pretending to, out of some possibly misguided sense that to _not_ telegraph enjoyment of the food Lee had offered him would be to disappoint him. Maybe Lee didn’t care if Gaara liked the pancakes or not. 

In the end, nerves won over honesty. He pinched off another piece of now-soggy pancake and placed it in his mouth. It tasted mostly like inoffensive, wet sugar.

“It all ends up in the same place anyway.” He’d heard Kankuro say this before, pouring beer over his cereal to Temari’s aghast expression. 

“I could … get you a fork,” Lee said slowly, tracking the path of Gaara’s fingers to his mouth. 

Gaara picked up a piece of espresso-laden strawberry and took a bite. Fruit and coffee grounds didn’t mix. It tasted vile.

“This is fine,” he said, and licked syrup off his fingers. 

Lee made a soft choking noise. When Gaara looked up, his face had gone very red. 

Gaara’s phone buzzed on the plasticine tabletop. He looked down at it. 

“My sister will be here soon,” he said, just as the door to the shop swung open to the tinkle of bells. 

Temari stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, scanning the floor with a keen eye. Gaara lifted his hand to beckon her over and immediately regretted it as his shoulder throbbed. She was dressed for the office, and her high heels clicked on the tile floor as she crossed the busy shop to them. 

Lee straightened immediately. “Is this your sister?”

Gaara just nodded, systematically picking at another piece of the pancake. Maybe it was just the company, but the soggy dough was starting to grow on him. 

Temari arrived at the table and unshouldered her bag. 

Lee leapt to his feet in an instant and held his hand out to shake. 

“It’s very nice to meet you, miss! My name is Rock Lee! Please be assured your brother is in the best of hands.”

She looked up, and up, and up. Temari was the tallest of her siblings, even taller in heels, but Lee practically towered over her. She returned his handshake but didn’t reply to him in favor of turning to Gaara. 

“Is this …?” She pointed with one manicured nail. 

Gaara nodded, accepting the orange pill bottle when she passed it to him. 

“Ohh.” She poorly suppressed a sadistic smile that threatened to spread across her face. “I have _got_ to get a picture of this.” 

She pulled out her phone and pointed it in Lee’s direction. Gaara ducked out of the way of the camera’s view, halfway cowering behind the tabletop. 

“No, no,” she scolded him. “You too. Hop up and squeeze in. Kankuro’s gonna want to see—” She looked Lee up and down again. “—all of this.” 

Lee frowned, his face a mask of spectacular confusion while Gaara climbed awkwardly to his feet and came to stand beside him. If this moment was going to be immortalized on camera, he wished he would have been wearing something nicer than a wrinkled undershirt and donut-crumb-flecked jeans. 

“Kankuro?” Lee whispered. 

“My brother,” Gaara muttered back. “My siblings had a bet going on when I’d have my first date.”

“First—?” 

Gaara blanched. He hadn’t meant to admit that he had never gone on a date before today. 

Lee was frowning now. Gaara’s nerves churned sickly in his stomach. He wished he would have thought to have Temari bring his other medications, too. Although, partaking of a veritable personal pharmacy in front of Lee would probably have made as bad an impression as admitting that, at twenty-something years old, he had no romantic experience whatsoever. He wondered if he should have mentioned, when he’d said Lee draped over his back was the most physical contact he’d had since high school, that he was talking about a fist fight.

“That seems rather cruel,” Lee said quietly. 

The nerves abated all at once; Gaara could practically hear the _whoosh_ as they fled him. He had no idea what to do with this unexpected aspect Lee had chosen to fixate on.

“It’s just how they show affection.” He shrugged. “Older sibling stuff.”

“Hmm, well. I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Lee beamed at him, and Gaara was tempted to blink at the brightness of that smile, nearly blinded. “Let’s give them a good photo, then. Something to talk about!” 

He wrapped one arm around Gaara and tugged him close. Gaara froze. He could feel Lee’s muscles flexing all along the breadth of his back. He’d nearly managed to push the heated memory of Lee’s body pressed over his out of his mind, but now it all came flooding back to him. His arm was so warm. 

“Ready?” Temari asked. Gaara barely heard her. He’d almost forgotten she was there. “Three, two, one—”

The flash went off. Half the coffee shop turned to look at them. Gaara wanted to climb under a chair in shame. Ideally beneath Lee’s. 

Temari seemed utterly unruffled by the attention, instead turning her phone around to show the picture to Lee for his approval.

Lee’s face brightened. “Can you send that to me?” 

“Sure.” She tapped the screen a few times and held the phone out for Lee to send himself the photo. “Gaara, do you want me to send it to you, too?”

Gaara had yet to see the photo. For all he knew the image was as mortifying as the experience of taking it had been. 

“No,” he said, his mouth moving faster than his brain. “Lee can send it to me. That way we’ll have each other’s numbers.” 

He hardly noticed Temari’s departure in the flurry of heart palpitations that ensued, as he cupped Lee’s phone in his hands and entered his number with shaking fingers.

He was pretty sure she called, “Be safe!” over her shoulder as she left. He tried not to read any extra meaning into it. 

The background of Lee’s phone was him and his roommates in some kind of athletically improbable push-up stack. Lee was at the bottom, supporting both Neji’s and Tenten’s weight atop him, his biceps straining at the apex of the push-up.

Gaara wondered if it would be weird to ask for a copy of that picture too. Probably, he decided. Better not to. 

The photo arrived moments later, from an unrecognized number that Gaara quickly saved as **Lee 💚**. He wasn’t one to use emoji, generally, but the circumstances seemed to warrant it. 

The photo was rapidly becoming Gaara’s favorite photo of all time. He hadn’t, until this moment, realized he even had a mental order of favorite photos, but the picture on his screen had summarily ousted all other contenders from the rankings. Not because Gaara thought he looked nice in it. Actually, he kind of looked like a dweeb, visibly flustered and staring not at the camera lens at all, but up into Lee’s face. 

But Lee looked … well, _good_ didn’t quite encompass it. His smile stretched from ear to ear, his dark eyes nearly closed with it. Temari’s camera was cheap and pixelated, but Gaara could just make out the shadow of Lee’s long lashes falling on his high cheekbones. The defined lines of his pectorals were barely visible beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt. He had one arm slung around Gaara’s, so that they were pressed side-to-side, and the difference in height and breadth between them was palpable. 

It was too soon to make that photo his phone background, wasn’t it? It definitely was. He did it anyway. 

He looked up from the photo to find that smile’s softer echo stretched across Lee’s face. His fingers clenched. The pill bottle rattled in his palm. He’d nearly forgotten it. 

He shook out two pills. Then, realizing his coffee was all lost to the soupy mess of pancakes turning to mush on his plate, he swallowed them back dry. 

His phone buzzed. It was a text from Temari.

**That was smooth! Way to seal the number deal!**

Gaara hadn’t _felt_ smooth, he’d felt awkward. He’d been trying to think of a way to ask for Lee’s number without sounding like a creep for the past forty-five minutes. When the moment presented itself, he’d had no choice but to grab it in shaking hands. 

He didn’t reply. He set his phone aside, screen-down to eliminate the distraction, and turned back to Lee. 

He was eyeing Gaara with a look of sympathy. 

“Does it feel any better?” he asked.

Gaara shrugged. His shoulder twinged. The pills hadn’t had a chance to start working yet, and they’d be battling a couple hours of steadily rising pain when they did finally take effect. He was supposed to take them as soon as it started hurting, though he rarely did. 

“No,” he said, “but it will.” It probably wouldn’t. The pain there was a constant, dull throb even on good days, ramping up to sharp spikes of agony on days he overdid it. Days like today. The medication might blunt the edges, but a stab wound was still a stab wound. 

He looked for a place to stow his pill bottle, realizing belatedly that the pockets of his jeans had barely enough space for his phone and wallet. Well, the color matched the obnoxious neon of his donut shop shirt well enough, so he buried the bottle in the bundle of clothing beside him, tucking the fabric up to conceal the label. He sat back up to a twinge of his shoulder and gripped it. 

Lee watched Gaara rub his shoulder with a frown on his face. He raised his hand and reached out. For a moment, Gaara almost thought he was going to touch him. But then he seemed to think better of it. His hand fell back to the tabletop. 

“What happened to your shoulder?” he murmured, then hastily added, “If you don’t mind me asking?” 

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t like it was a secret, it was just that Gaara hardly knew any people outside his siblings and Naruto, his single, lingering friend from childhood. And they already knew what had happened. Besides, Lee wasn’t eyeballing him with a look of morbid curiosity, the way he sometimes got stares when he changed in the locker room in high school, or when Temari dragged him along to the public pool in summers. Lee wasn’t looking at him at all, actually, eyes carefully on the picture postcards scattering the tabletop. But his expression was one of … concern. 

“I got in a bad fight, back in school,” he said finally. “I went to a disciplinary school, so I should have known better than to start something. I didn’t even have a good reason for fighting, I just wanted to hurt someone. The other guy pulled a knife.”

Lee gasped. 

“It hit the bone, shattered my clavicle. It’s never been the same since then.” Gaara looked up quickly and felt his eyes widen. If he’d hoped to come across as semi-normal for his first date, he assumed he’d failed just then. “I’m. Not like that anymore.” 

Lee dropped his hand from his mouth and smiled at him, his face sunny with reassurance. His teeth were very straight and even and bright, bright white. Gaara’s heart throbbed in time with his shoulder. 

“I think we all have parts of our pasts that we’d rather leave behind us,” Lee said. “People’s capacity for change is among the most wonderful parts of being human.” 

Gaara dropped his eyes to his wet fruit and pancake mush. A glob of undissolved whipped cream spun idly in the greasy mixture, like an iceberg in an oil slick. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher,” he muttered. He looked back up at Lee through his bangs. “So, what’s yours?” 

“What’s my what?” That smile hadn’t left Lee’s face. 

“The part of your past that you regret.” Gaara stuck his finger in the slime of his plate and dragged it, drawing idle patterns in the mess. “Since I just poured my heart out to you.” 

Lee’s bottom lip jutted as he seemed to sink deep into thought. His face was terrifically expressive. The phrase ‘wears his heart on his sleeve’ must have been written about him, because Gaara could read every thought in the shifts of his expression. Picking up ideas, casting them aside, before finally settling on the words he wanted to say.

“Most people would probably expect it to be my accident,” Lee said at length. “But I don’t regret it, really. All it did was teach me about my limits and the power of perseverance.”

Gaara arched an eyebrow. “Accident?” 

“Mmhm.” Lee nodded. “I was in a martial arts fight that ended …” His small mouth furrowed. “... badly. It wasn’t a licensed fight. I did many foolish things as a hotheaded teenager, not least of which was underground fighting. I would tell people I did it for the prize money, since I was a broke college student, but really it was all about the thrill of victory.” His straight, bright-white smile had gone a bit crooked. “Not so dissimilar to your story, I suppose. Although my opponent didn’t have a knife.” 

There was a feeling in Gaara’s chest like the sweet, tremulous obverse of a pending panic attack. Something struggling to break free, like a cicada cracking its shell in spring. He’d assumed he and Lee were opposites, that forging any sort of relationship out of their tentative mutual attraction would be hard work and compromise. That he’d have to soften all his sharp edges in the face of Lee’s warm, open heart. Perhaps they weren’t as different as he’d thought. 

“I took a throw badly. Off the mat and then I hit a wall. I don’t remember much after that, but apparently the guy kept coming after me even after I was unconscious. It broke my back and tore the ligaments in my thigh and upper arm. They were able to remove most of the bone fragments from my spine, but then the site got infected, and … it was pretty touch-and-go there for a while.” 

Gaara gaped at him. 

“But … you get around just fine now. You—” _Work out, obviously_ , he didn’t say. That would be overtly desperate even for him. He gestured to Lee’s clothes, the neon orange of his sneakers sticking from under the table where his legs were stretched out, his ankles crossed. “—run?” 

Lee laughed. It was a clear, sharp thing, and it pierced Gaara’s heart like an icepick. “That’s all thanks to excellent physical therapy!” His thick eyebrows raised. “I was determined not to let my injury hold me back. And I don’t like medicine.”

“You don’t take medicine?” Gaara couldn’t imagine having survived his injury recovery, much less his day-to-day life, without the chalky tabs. He needed them to make his brain quiet enough to put his thoughts in order, to dim the brightness of the world so he could move in it. Without the cotton of their cushioning, life shook him so hard it broke him. 

He’d tried it before. 

He wouldn’t again. 

Perhaps the similarities between them really were too few. 

“You must be made of sterner stuff than me.”

“It’s not a competition!” Lee thinned his lips. “I don’t mean to sound judgmental. It’s a personal decision. I just didn’t like how it made me feel. I’d rather just muscle through it, even if it’s more difficult on some days than others. The weather makes it worse sometimes. It’s much more painful when—”

“— it rains,” Gaara muttered simultaneously.

Lee beamed. “Exactly!” 

“It’s the barometric pressure, that’s what Temari says.”

“Your sister sounds very wise.” 

Just then, Gaara’s phone buzzed several times in short order, the sound insistent.

“I’m sorry, that might be her now.” He turned the phone over to squint at the screen. Rarely did he get more than a single text message or email at once. So many at once was an anomaly, and possibly an indication of an emergency. 

What he saw on his notifications bar didn’t speak to an emergency at all, however. Temari had texted the picture of him and Lee to their family group chat, and now Kankuro was responding in a barrage of messages.

**DUDE!!**  
**u didn’t tell us he was a giant!!**  
**wen u said “tall” i thot u ment like**  
**NORMAL big**  
**bc ur so shrimpy**  
**how tall is he anyway??**

Gaara looked up from his phone screen. “How tall are you?”

Lee seemed jarred by the sudden shift in conversation topic. He rubbed the back of his neck, a blush rising to paint the line of those defined cheekbones. “Um, about 6’1”, I think?” 

**he’s 6’1”.**  
**please stop interrupting me. i’m busy.**

Kankuro just responded with a series of eye emojis. Gaara had no idea what to make of that, so he ignored it.

“Sorry.” He considered muting his phone’s notifications, but decided against it at the last second. If there really were an emergency, he still wanted his siblings to be able to reach him. Even if Kankuro was an obnoxious double-texter. 

“So.” Gaara shifted in his seat, searching for an acceptable topic of first date conversation. He hadn’t expected, when he was running late for work this morning, that he would have ended up here. Otherwise he would have researched what normal people talked about on these sorts of occasions. He assumed most people didn’t open their getting-to-know-you conversations with an exploration of their mutual traumas. “What do you do for work?”

Lee had mentioned work a few times in their previous, brief conversations, though never with much detail. Gaara knew he had mentioned kids, and that the athletic clothes he frequently wore were apparently suitable for his job, but that was it.

Lee brightened. “I’m a part-time substitute teacher!” He beamed. “Mostly for the PE and special education classes.” 

That aligned perfectly with everything Gaara knew about him so far. 

“Do you like it?” He couldn’t imagine Lee _not_ enjoying the opportunity to shape young hearts and minds through fitness. God, the train of thought even sounded like him in Gaara’s internal monologue. 

“I do!” Lee’s eyes practically sparkled, his hands fisted in front of his chest. “I truly relish the opportunity to help the students reach their full potential in both academics and athletics!” 

_Called it,_ Gaara thought, not uncharitably. He could feel a smile creeping up the corners of his mouth, leaving his lips tingly and unfamiliar. 

“Although …” Lee’s hands dropped. “It’s a small school district, so there are not as many shifts for someone with my certifications as I’d like. The rest of the time, I work at a gym as a personal trainer.”

Of course he did. There was the faintest shadow in Lee’s bicep as he gesticulated, just under the edge of his shirtsleeve, a clearly defined line of muscle. Gaara swallowed, though there was nothing in his mouth. 

“It’s the same gym where I did my physical therapy after my accident, actually,” Lee added, tucking back into his pancakes. “Most of the credit for my recovery lies in the hands of the owner there.” 

There was a fleck of whipped cream on Lee’s upper lip. 

Gaara’s fingers clenched on the tabletop. He wondered what it would taste like to lick it off him. If he just reached across the table, fisted his hand in the thin fabric of that t-shirt and—

“Are you …” He coughed as Lee licked his mouth and utterly failed to dislodge the whipped cream. “... trying to turn either of those into a full-time thing?” 

Lee hummed, bouncing his knife against his plate like a drumstick in a timpani roll. “I’m not really sure what I want my career to be, to be honest. My degree is in education, but …”

“Early twenties indecisiveness.” Gaara smiled wryly. “I get that.”

“It’s not quite that. I know the things I like to do, and the work that I enjoy. It’s just that there are so many of them! I would need to be two or three people to chase all my passions to the fullest!” 

“I see.” 

Across the table, Gaara _did_ see. Lee was practically bubbling over with enthusiasm. He could look rather severe when his expression was serious, his lips small and pinched when closed. But his smile softened him utterly, his eyebrows rising under the straight fringe of his silky hair and his wide eyes wrinkling with happiness. 

“And what about you?” Lee asked, all genuine interest. “I don’t mean to presume, but I’m guessing in a donut shop isn’t your dream? It’s just that you seem very smart. I can’t imagine it being mentally stimulating for you.”

Gaara stilled for a moment, watching the spot of whipped cream move on Lee’s animated face as he grinned. There was no good way to say, _My high school disciplinary record was so bad that no university would even consider me, and my mental health was in such shambles that I couldn’t even think of taking community college classes._ Even after confessing to jumping a boy in school because he couldn’t tame his own roiling emotions, just because he wanted to see someone hurt as much as he did. 

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “There are things that I like, but nothing that I think I could make a career out of.” 

“And what sorts of things are those?”

“I like … gardening.” Gaara thought of the windowsill in his bedroom, the mint plant in full, flourishing bloom after several false starts. The fresh, clean scent of it and how it cleared his head. He thought of his hands deep in soil, gloves on the ground and dirt in his nailbeds, and of his fingers squishing through the clay at the rec center art class Kankuro made him join with him. “Sculpture. Things I can do with my hands.”

He spread his fingers on the tabletop. Lee’s eyes lingered perhaps a beat too long on his scarred knuckles. 

“I see!” His eyes snapped back to Gaara’s face. “And you mentioned your brother is a tattoo artist! Are all your family artistic?” 

“Temari does something very technical with contract law that I don’t fully understand. I don’t think she’d recognize a crayon if one hit her in the face.” Lee’s eyes were watching him intently. It was slightly intimidating, to hold the full force of someone’s attention like that. “But … she bakes.”

“That’s a kind of creativity, too!” 

“I think she likes it because everything’s very precise, actually.” 

“It’s a shame you don’t have much of a sweet tooth.” Lee nodded to the now-cold and congealed sludge of Gaara’s plate. 

“She makes bread sometimes.” Gaara shifted his shoulders in a gesture of indifference. Either the medicine was working exceptionally well, or Lee’s conversation was wholly distracting him, because he felt almost no pain right now. “I like that.” 

Lee opened his mouth and looked to be about to ask another question when his phone rang. Not vibrated, actually rang, like a grandmother with her first Jitterbug. The chiptune notes of a MIDI version of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ filled the air. 

Lee fumbled the phone into his hands and silenced it. His eyes were wide and his expression hangdog with regret when he said, “I am so sorry! I have to leave for work.” 

“It’s fine,” Gaara said, though his heart was sinking rapidly through his chest. Their date was coming to an end and, other than clumsily managing to score Lee’s phone number, he’d yet to make a move. 

“Please wait just one moment while I go get a box!” Lee leapt from the table, leaving Gaara to sit there and fidget with his phone. Kankuro had sent him several more text messages’ worth of eye emojis. He responded to them with a single neutral face and a middle finger. 

Lee was back in short order with a to-go box and a paper cup with a plastic lid in his hands. He held the cup out to Gaara. Gaara blinked at it for a moment before taking it. It was warm beneath the crenellated paper sleeve.

“I felt so terrible about you missing out on your coffee!” Lee said. He jiggled the box. “And my eyes are always too big for my stomach.”

Gaara lifted the lid and sniffed. The scent was sharp, plain and black, just the way he liked it. 

“Thank you.” 

Lee started making for the door, and Gaara climbed to his feet to follow him. This was his last chance. 

“You really shouldn’t drink that stuff after noon,” Lee was saying over his shoulder. “It is terrible for your sleep schedule.”

“My sleep schedule is a work in progress,” Gaara conceded. 

The glass door swung shut behind them, and suddenly Lee stopped short and turned. Gaara very nearly tripped over his own two feet trying to stop before he collided with Lee’s chest. He managed it, but only just. They ended up standing very close, Gaara’s feet practically between Lee’s own.

“Um.” Lee looked down at him. Gaara was right at the level of his collar, and above it he could see a flush bleeding up Lee’s skin, the pulse of his throat jumping. “I had a really nice time. I’d like to do this again sometime soon, if that’s all right with you.” 

“Soon.” Gaara nodded rapidly. “I’ll text you tonight.” 

Lee grinned. “And I’ll text you back.” 

He was so close Gaara could smell the syrup on his breath, could see the stray little dark hairs that that spot of whipped cream still clung to. There were plans now, future plans with tidy little objectives that Gaara could plan and map out. Something solid. 

Now there was only one thing left. The thing he’d been thinking about since Tenten had uttered the words ‘first date’ while they’d still been lodged together in the donut case. Something he’d only seen in movies and dreamed about sprawled out in his bed. The end-of-date kiss. 

Riding on impulse, he went up on his tiptoes and swiped his thumb along the corner of Lee’s mouth. He sucked the remainder of the whipped cream off his thumb, though he couldn’t say why. On Lee or off, it was still whipped cream, and therefore tasted terrible. 

Lee’s mouth worked soundlessly. The splotchy red on his neck deepened. 

“Oh!” he breathed, seeming to collect himself. “Is that what you were looking at earlier? I was worried that …”

“Worried that … ?”

“Um.” Lee rubbed the back of his neck hard with his fist. “I’ve been told often that I’m … rather odd-looking. I was worried you’d finally noticed the eyebrows.”

“The eyebrows were the first thing I noticed.” Lee’s face fell, and Gaara hastened to amend. “I don’t think you’re odd-looking. I was wondering what would happen if I pulled you across the table and kissed you.”

Lee’s big eyes went massive. His irises were so dark that his pupils practically vanished into them, but this close, Gaara could see the way those dark spots encroached on the little striations of dark and light brown. 

“I probably would have spilled my coffee, too,” Lee squeaked. Gaara wasn’t really listening to him, he was mapping the shapes and colors of Lee’s dark eyes with his own, studying the shape of Lee’s lips as they moved. “But we could uh. We could find out for sure, if you wanted.” 

Gaara didn’t reply, he just grabbed for the front of Lee’s shirt and hauled him down to eye level. There was the wet _splat_ of a takeout box dispatching its contents on the ground, then Lee’s large hands were clutching at his arms, tugging him closer. 

It was everything Gaara had never dared to hope a first kiss might be. Lee’s lips were soft and warm, his hands strong as he pulled Gaara close. His thumb made little circles in the thin skin of Gaara’s elbow, which sent unexpected, sensual little shocks down Gaara’s spine. 

He moved his mouth like he knew what he was doing, and Gaara tried his clumsy best to imitate him. He tried not to think about where and how Lee had learned to do this. Obviously someone this kind and handsome and charming wouldn’t have had his first kiss in his mid-twenties in broad daylight on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop, with a crumpled uniform shirt and visor jammed under his arm. 

Gaara thought maybe he should be jealous. That would be the normal emotion here, envy of the person who’d taught Lee how to kiss sweet and slow like this, how to just gently lick at someone’s lower lip so that their mouth gasped open. But if anything, all Gaara could muster was a faint sense of gratitude. A kind of regard. _Thank you, mysterious stranger, for working out all his awkwardness. He’s mine now._

Lee was just walking him backwards towards the building’s facade, Gaara licking at his teeth, when Lee’s phone went off again. 

Lee drew back with a gasp. “I really have to go. I’m going to be late!” he exhaled. His lips were pink and damp with Gaara’s spit. He squeezed Gaara’s arms apologetically. “I’ll look for your text.” 

It wasn’t until Lee blew him a kiss goodbye and jogged off that Gaara realized his to-go coffee was pooling in his shoes.

* * *

Kankuro staggered through the kitchen door with a crash. 

“Timezzit?” 

Gaara glanced up at the clock on the stove, its gently glowing green digits. “Four thirty AM.” 

“Fuck.” Kankuro stumbled into the chair across the table from Gaara. Its feet screeched across the linoleum. He stunk like sweat and at least four different flavors of vape smoke. “Why’re you up already?”

Gaara just tilted his chin to the pot of coffee percolating on the counter. 

Kankuro squinted at him. “Don’t you work at a coffee shop? Why d’you need to get up early to make coffee at home?” 

“Donut shop,” Gaara corrected him. He also wasn’t up early; he simply hadn’t slept the night before. He’d been too preoccupied, too jittery, lighting up and deadening his phone screen over and over to read and re-read his brief text message conversation with Lee. Even when he’d closed his eyes and tried to lay back, his heart had pounded like he’d run a marathon. His phone battery was now in a state of precariousness that would require a miracle for it to survive through the end of his shift. “And the coffee at work sucks.” 

“Gotcha.” Kankuro stretched his arms over his head. He was wearing a sleeveless hoodie, and in the faint pre-sunrise light sneaking through the kitchen curtains, Gaara could see specks of white stick deodorant in his armpits, like he’d tried to hastily cover up his ambient stench and failed utterly. “Cool if I get some of that? I’ve got a hangover and I haven’t even hit the ‘over’ part yet.” 

Gaara silently nodded his assent. 

“Soooo.” Kankuro waggled his heavily made-up eyebrows. “How was it?” 

Gaara squinted at him, head still muzzy from insomnia. When he hadn’t been scrolling fruitlessly through the few lines of his and Lee’s text conversation, he’d spend the rest of the night replaying their first kiss in his mind. He’d heard somewhere that orgasms were supposed to help with sleep. They hadn’t worked. All he’d succeeded in doing was utterly ruining a pair of pajama pants and necessitating a middle-of-the-night sheet change and shower. His dick was still a little sore. 

“How was what?” 

“Your first date with Jack the Beanstalk!” 

“His name’s Lee. And I’m pretty sure it’s Jack _and_ the Beanstalk. Jack was the guy who climbed the beanstalk.” 

“So that makes you Jack, then.” 

Gaara rolled his eyes.

Kankuro seemed to accept this as a complete answer, standing with an exaggerated groan to fill their mugs as Gaara pondered, zoning out. He passed Gaara his mug of plain black coffee before tanning his with far more than the recommended serving size of flavored creamer. 

“I’m definitely going to climb him like a beanstalk,” Gaara said without inflection, still staring into the middle distance.

Kankuro choked and sputtered. “After _one_ date?” 

Gaara turned to glare at him. There was coffee dripping down Kankuro’s chin and onto his filthy hoodie. It looked like Kankuro had let one of his miscreant friends practice their tattooing on him again; there was a fresh, badly misshapen suite of card symbols along the back of his knuckles. He was going to run out of space on his skin sooner rather than later. 

“We have a second date planned for Friday. At the movies.” 

“That soon? Coming across kinda desperate, aren’t ya? You’re gonna jump his bones in a crowded theater?” 

Gaara shrugged. 

“No, that isn’t how this works. You gotta have at least two fancy dates first.” Kankuro took a long sip of his coffee, then pointed at Gaara like a lecturer. “And he’s gotta pay for them.”

“He bought me coffee.” Gaara bristled. “Two coffees, actually. And a sandwich. And pancakes.” 

Kankuro boggled at him. “ _You_ ate pancakes?”

“They weren’t very good. They were wet because I spilled my coffee on them.”

“Of course you did. But listen, you gotta get him to do better than that. He’s gotta put in some effort, prove you’re worth it.”

“This is bullshit.” Gaara crossed his arms tight over his chest, his coffee sitting untouched on the table before him. “We already spent an hour with him on top of me in a sweaty donut shop. I already kissed him. Why should I have to wait longer?”

“You kissed him?” Kankuro squawked.

Gaara ignored him. “Who came up with these rules?” 

“I mean, me, basically. I more or less wrote the book on dating.” 

Gaara could tell Kankuro was being glib. And he’d failed to address why societal expectations didn’t align with Gaara’s immediate desires. 

“... And I say you gotta work this a little bit. No more kiddie shit. At least make the guy buy you dinner first.”

“I like pizza,” Gaara said at length.

“No!” Kankuro’s forehead hit the tabletop, rattling both their mugs and spilling yet more coffee. “Oh my god, you’re worse than a cheap whore!”

* * *

On the evening of their second date, Gaara stood next to Lee in the concession line, shuffling his feet. 

“Kankuro says I have to make you buy me pizza before we can kiss again,” he muttered.

Lee turned with an urgent look on his face. Their ticket stubs crumpled in his fist.

“I don’t think they sell pizza here,” he said quickly, pulling his arm from around Gaara’s shoulder to face him fully. “Would you rather we go get pizza? We can leave right now.”

“No.” Gaara butted his head against Lee’s arm. His bicep made for a pleasantly warm cushion. He wasn’t wearing running clothes today, but rather a short-sleeved button-down shirt that only served to emphasize the breadth of his arms and shoulders. They’d already gotten a few stares, and, while Gaara’s logic brain told him that it was probably because they were two men being visibly gay in public and also because Lee had started crying when Gaara offered to pay for the tickets, he preferred to think it was just because people were jealous of his handsome date. And Lee looked especially handsome tonight, right down to the little cartoon barbells printed on his shirt. His hair was particularly shiny, and when Gaara pressed close, he smelled like musky cologne. “Kankuro’s an idiot. I want to watch a movie with you.”

Lee chuckled. His arm came back up around Gaara’s shoulder, and Gaara sunk back into his body heat. “Do you think your brother would consider popcorn an acceptable substitute for pizza? I know it doesn’t have the same nutritional profile, but—”

“I don’t care what he thinks,” Gaara muttered mulishly, arms folded. “Popcorn sounds good.” 

Lee’s laughter was like the pealing of bells. Or something better than that, because Gaara had grown up next door to a church and actually found the sound of tolling bells rather annoying. Most repetitive sounds grated on him, but Lee’s laughter was like … well. The only thing that really compared to it was _Lee’s laughter_. It was a phenomenon unto itself. 

It took a few more steps before Gaara’s mind fully processed the implication of Lee’s suggested substitution. Lee intended to kiss him later. 

Gaara would gladly fast-forward through the entire movie for the chance to do that again.

The line moved. Lee moved with it. Gaara didn’t. 

In his haste to catch up, he tripped over the carpet and went tumbling forward. 

His hands were still tucked in his armpits, so he didn’t move them quickly enough to catch himself. And though Lee lunged for Gaara to steady him, he missed. 

Gaara’s body plunged right through a wire rack of boxed candy. The entire apparatus collided with the concession counter with a terrible crash. 

Gaara looked up from the drift of Snowcaps and Jujubes around him to find Lee’s concerned face hovering over him, his hands spread.

“Are you okay? I’m so sorry! There must have been a lump in the carpet, or—” 

The carpet was perfectly flat, if a bit sticky with spilled soda and dusty with popcorn crumbs. Gaara glowered at it. It did not appear to be cowed, remaining steadfastly garishly patterned. 

“We will clean it up! I’m terribly sorry for the mess!” Lee was saying to someone over Gaara’s shoulder, bending down and grabbing Gaara beneath both armpits to bundle him to his feet.

It was like he hardly weighed anything at all. Gaara hadn’t known that was something that interested him, but Lee’s ease with handling his body sent his blood flowing south with a dizzying quickness. 

There were a few high tables near the restrooms, and that’s where Lee sat him while he proceeded to try to put the candy display back to rights, much to the chagrin of the concession attendant. It was no hardship to watch him. The tradeoff from his running shorts was a pair of dark, well-fitting jeans, and Lee was bent fully over to gather the scattered boxes. 

Something trickled down Gaara’s forehead. He raised his hand to wipe it, and his fingers came away bloodied. There was a faint, pulsing pain in the area of his birthmark. His shoulder ached from his fall. 

Gaara stared at his red-smeared fingers with something akin to indifference. He’d had to get used to the sight of his own scrapes and bruises, with the way he stumbled through life. It was like his body expected something—some _one_ —to be there to catch him, and was surprised every time there wasn’t. Whatever his hindbrain was expecting to cushion him, it didn’t exist. 

Except—Gaara thought, seeing Lee rushing over with wide, panicked eyes—maybe now it did.

“You’re bleeding!” Lee exclaimed. 

“It happens.” 

“Injuries to the face bleed a lot, oh—” Lee licked his thumb and swiped it across Gaara’s browbone. He sucked the blood off his thumb and went back to do it again before seeming to notice his own actions. He froze, blood on his lips. His dark eyes were huge and fathomless. “I’m so sorry! That wasn’t very sanitary of me! I just acted without thinking!” 

“I’ll just wait for it to stop on its own,” Gaara said, not really paying attention to Lee’s words. His eyes were fixed on Lee’s mouth. 

“I can’t let you do that! You’ll bleed all over the place. Are there—?” Lee looked frantically around at the nearby tables, but didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. “I’ll just … Oh, cripes.” 

He unbuttoned his shirt one-handed and slung it off, balling it up in his fist. 

Gaara’s breath thinned in his lungs. Lee was wearing an undershirt, but the fabric of it was very thin, and it was tucked neatly into his belted jeans. It only served to emphasize the shape of his body, his narrow waist, his broad shoulders. 

Lee was pressing the fabric to Gaara’s face, but Gaara was hardly aware of the gentle pressure. All he heard were Lee’s murmured instructions to tilt his head back, _yes, that’s right, just relax, I’ll take care of you._

In the end, they missed the first half of the movie to cleaning the lobby and Gaara’s face. The second half was lost to a screaming sort of joyous panic that rocketed through Gaara when Lee lifted the plastic armrest between their seats and took his hand. 

Gaara didn’t mind. He was still thinking about the way his blood looked on Lee’s mouth, and how it tasted when he licked it off Lee’s lips in the back row of the theater.

* * *

Their third date was at a proper, fancy restaurant, the kind of place Kankuro would have approved of (although Gaara suspected he wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place himself). 

Lee ordered red wine and poured Gaara a glass before disclosing that he himself didn’t drink. Gaara admitted he didn’t either—it didn’t mix well with his medications—and Lee laughed beautifully before ordering them both sparkling cider. 

Lee offered Gaara a bite of his appetizer, and Gaara narrowly managed to avoid catching his own sleeve on fire from the candle in the middle of the table … only to punch right through his still-full wine glass. 

The glass shattered on the table, sending crystalline shards flying every which way. 

“Oh no!” Lee grabbed for Gaara’s hand immediately. “Are you all right? That must have startled you.”

“I ruined your shirt,” Gaara said dully. Lee’s crisp white shirt had a splash of wine up the front of it like a bloodstain, not to even speak of the linen tablecloth, which was now saturated with alcohol. 

“It’s just a shirt! I’m more worried about you.” Lee turned Gaara’s hand over in his palm and gasped. “You cut your hand!” 

Gaara hadn’t even felt it. Lee’s hand was so large that Gaara’s was swallowed by it. “It’s fine.”

“I have a First Aid kit in the car! Please come with me!”

They ended up in the backseat of Lee’s eminently practical little coupe, Lee swaddling Gaara’s hand in an unnecessary bulk of gauze. 

“You didn’t have this before,” Gaara said quietly. 

“Have—?”

Gaara nodded at the white plastic box open at Lee’s feet, spilling bandages and sanitizing wipes onto the rug. “You had to use your shirt last time.”

“Ah, well.” A blush crept up Lee’s cheeks. He tucked Gaara’s gauze wrap in neatly and fastened it with tape, clearly practiced, then rubbed the back of his neck. “I just thought, after the whole … getting stuck in the donut case, and then the coffee, and your fall … It just seemed safer to.” 

A warm feeling nestled in next to Gaara’s heart, distinctly Lee-shaped. It was sort of sweet. It was really sweet, actually, thoughtful in a way Gaara hadn’t thought to expect. He wanted Lee to know how grateful he was for that care, though he didn’t have the words. ‘Thank you’ felt inadequate. ‘Thank you’ was what he said when a stranger held the door or a customer paid in exact change. It was transactional. It couldn’t encompass this feeling, the knowledge that Lee had rearranged his day, gone out of his way, out of anticipatory concern for his wellbeing. 

Gaara felt _known_. It thrilled him as much as it terrified him. 

He reached for the lapel of Lee’s starched shirt and pulled Lee on top of him. Lee went down with a little _oof_ , catching himself with one hand on the side of Gaara’s head against the window and the other on the door handle.

Gaara kissed him messily, all heat and gratitude and no finesse at all. He kissed the sparkle of grape juice right out of his mouth, until all he could taste was _Lee_. The buttons of Lee’s ruined shirt parted under his fingers, and he pulled and tugged at him until Lee’s knee was between his own two spread ones. 

Ultimately, Gaara’s clumsy, bandaged catcher’s mitt of a hand got tangled in the seatbelt, and when Lee tried to free him, he only managed to unlatch the car door, sending them both spilling into the parking lot. 

And though his shoulder complained at the rough treatment, Gaara couldn’t bring himself to be upset.

* * *

Breakfast seemed a safer choice for a fourth date. There were fewer pitfalls Gaara could foresee. Certainly less opportunity for glass or fire. Even if it did mean waking up painfully early on his day off after a night of ruined sleep, because Lee rose with the sun like a rooster, and his Saturday training sessions started at 7 AM. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to do that for you?” Lee eyed Gaara spreading his bagel with cream cheese warily. 

“It’s fine. The knife is dull,” Gaara said, then promptly poked himself in the web between his index finger and thumb with the butter knife. “Ow.” 

He narrowed his eyes at the knife like it was conspiring to make him look bad. 

“Please let me—” Lee tried to pry the knife from Gara’s fingers. 

Gaara pulled back. “Lee, I can spread my own bagel.”

“Clearly you _can’t_!” 

Gaara relented. Though he suspected Lee would have been seconds from cutting the damn thing into bite-sized pieces and hand-feeding it to him if he hadn’t snatched his own plate back the moment the bagel was spread. 

Breakfast was otherwise surprisingly uneventful. They played footsie under the table and batted back and forth banter about Lee’s tattoo appointment the following week. 

Gaara was almost ready to breathe a sigh of relief as they walked out of the little cafe. That was, until the hood of the jacket tied around his waist snagged on the door handle, drawing him up short. 

He cursed under his breath, trying to twist in the way least offensive to his shoulder in order to unsnare himself. 

Lee, a few steps ahead and burdened with to-go containers, turned and rushed back.

“Oops!” His small mouth crumpled into a moue of dismay. He set down his takeout boxes and lifted Gaara bodily around the waist. Gaara’s feet left the ground entirely as Lee reached behind him and untangled his clothing from the handle. 

Feet back on the pavement, his new kink for being manhandled asserted itself with staggering clarity. 

Temari had started telling him it was a bad omen that all their dates ended this way. 

Gaara didn’t have time for fate or omens. He was finally within touching distance of something he wanted, and he intended to grab it with both hands. 

No matter how many times he stumbled along the way.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 'M' rating comes into play here.

It was the evening of their fifth official date.

Well, fifth from Lee’s point of view, at least. Gaara had declared accompanying Lee to get his tattoo didn’t count as a date, since his brother was going to be there. Lee had kindly refrained from pointing out that Gaara’s sister had borne witness to at least part of their first date, and they both agreed _that_ one had counted.

Oh, how it had counted. 

In any case, it was their fifth date on Lee’s part, and a nebulous joint activity on Gaara’s, and Lee had promised to make it up to him with a proper date as soon as his back was healed up enough for him to safely drive his car again. 

The man behind the counter at Ant and Crow Tattoo was pierced on every part of his face that a person could possibly be pierced, and some that Lee wouldn’t have imagined could hold metal bars. He regarded Lee and Gaara’s joined hands with a spectacularly unimpressed expression.

“You’re Kankuro’s appointment?” he asked. Lee wondered how he could even articulate his consonants with the amount of rings dangling from his lower lip. “The brother’s boyfriend?”

“I don’t think we’ve quite made that official yet!” Lee squeaked.

At the same time, Gaara squeezed his hand and said, “Yes.” 

Lee would never have guessed that the man who emerged from the black curtain draping the shop’s back room moments later was related to Gaara at all. They looked as opposite as two people could be. He was broad and stocky where Gaara was slim and lithe. And unlike Gaara, who preferred drab dark reds and conservative greys when he was out of his donut shop uniform, this man had tattoos in every color of the rainbow climbing both sides of his neck and blanketing his arms down beyond his wrists. He was wearing purple eyeliner. It was a daring and unusual choice, but one that suited his face. 

He clapped his hand over his mouth and coughed a laugh.

“Oh my god,” he wheezed. “It’s even more hilarious in person.” He turned to Gaara. “Do you have to get on a stepstool to give him a—” He made a very lewd gesture with his hand and tongue that left no room for misinterpretation. 

Lee’s face flooded with heat. 

Gaara rolled his eyes and dragged Lee past his brother’s waggling eyebrows, pausing long enough to elbow him sharply in his barrel chest. 

“We haven’t gotten that far yet, Kankuro,” he said dryly. 

“You’re kiddin’ me! I’m offering this guy a discount tattoo and he’s not even putting out yet?” Kankuro trailed them back to his station, which Gaara apparently knew the location of.

“I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as he does.”

“Oof.” Kankuro bent at the waist like he’d been gutpunched. “Okay, okay, I give. You win. Jeez. He’s ruthless, huh? All bite and no bark.” He looked to Lee as if seeking an ally. 

Lee sat down on the tattoo bench Kankuro indicated. “Gaara is a very kind and gentle soul!” 

Kankuro gave him a look of simultaneous cringing sympathy and no small amount of bafflement. 

“Damn, dude, you sure you’re talkin’ about the squirt here? He hasn’t been, like, spiking your protein shakes so you’ll hallucinate?”

“I eat a nutritionally complete diet so I don’t have any need for protein shakes!” Lee assured him. “Also, Gaara would never do such a thing.” 

Gaara had come to stand beside him, and now he leaned his head into Lee’s shoulder. Lee couldn’t see his face well from this angle, but there was a tilt to his head and a certain casualness of his crossed arms that seemed slightly smug. 

“Oh, you got it bad, huh?” Kankuro crossed over to a small metal sink in the back of the shop and began to wash his hands. 

The answer to that question was obviously ‘yes’, but Lee wasn’t sure if that was appropriate to say to Gaara’s brother, nor if the question had been rhetorical. “Thank you very much for being so generous with your rates!” he said instead. 

“Don’t mention it.” Kankuro tossed a paper towel in the trash can. “I should be thanking you. It’s not often that I get to do traditional designs.”

Lee looked around at the flash on the walls with surprise. Many of the designs Kankuro had displayed were clearly traditionally inspired, intricately scaled fish and scowling samurai in plate armor done in bold, painterly outlines and graceful shading. 

“I’m surprised you don’t get more requests for it! Your work is very impressive.” 

“Oh, I get plenty of requests.” Kankuro donned his gloves with a snap of nitrile. “I’m just not about to ink something traditional on some asshole who can’t even read it and just wants it because he thinks it looks cool. Not unless he wants the characters for ‘I Am A Giant Douche’ on his bicep under his ‘tribal’ armband.” He made air quotes with his blue-swathed fingers. 

Lee was nearly knocked out of his seat by a familiar wave of shame and chagrin. He scuffed his shoe against the cement floor, hesitant to admit that he wasn’t fluent in his own native language, and that he couldn’t even read the blocky characters on the hanging scrolls in Gai-sensei’s gym, much less the elaborate calligraphy on some of Kankuro’s more intricate designs. 

“Maybe this is not such a good idea,” he mumbled under his breath. 

“Kankuro.” Gaara tugged sharply on his brother’s sleeve. “I _told_ you that Lee—”

“What?” Kankuro barked at him. Then he turned to Lee, who hardly dared look at either of them, eyes resting on the brothers for just a beat before drifting back to the floor. It was difficult to tell beneath the makeup and hardware, but Kankuro’s face seemed to soften then. “Listen, man, just because you’re adopted doesn’t mean it’s not your culture, too. Besides, your idea is cool. All … meaningful and whatever.”

Lee’s fingers tightened on the squeaky black plastic of the seat. “Thank you.” His shoulders relaxed minutely. 

Gaara bent down next to his ear and murmured, “Kankuro has the text of a fast food receipt tattooed on the back of his calf. He’s not in any place to judge.”

Kankuro frowned. “Hey! It’s a pizza receipt, first of all.” 

“And you’re an Italian chef?” Gaara stood back and crossed his arms. 

“Kuroari needed to practice his lettering and it was all we had! And it’s on shit leg, so it doesn’t even count.” 

Lee’s eyes went wide. “What is … um—” He dropped his voice. “— _s-word_ leg?” 

“You know you can cuss here, right?” Kankuro scowled. “It’s a tattoo shop, not a fucking church.” 

“Lee doesn’t curse,” Gaara noted, voice carefully monotone.

“And you ended up with _Gaara?_ ” Kankuro looked at Lee pointedly. “Wait ‘til you hear him get on a real tear about something that pissed him off, he’ll turn your ears blue.” 

Gaara shifted irritably. 

“I have already witnessed some of Gaara’s more, uh, colorful monologues!” Lee hastened to correct, grabbing for Gaara’s waist and tugging him closer. “Just last week he got his apron caught in the cash register and said several things I can’t repeat! It doesn’t bother me! It’s just a personal choice I’ve made!” 

Kankuro narrowed his eyes. “Guess opposites really do attract.” 

“‘Shit leg’ is what Kankuro calls his leg that he lets his apprentices practice on,” Gaara said. “Most of the tattoos are ridiculous and not particularly meaningful.”

Kankuro threw his hands up. “The _meaning_ is that I got to teach someone a cool technique! Pig skin only gets you so far; you gotta practice on a person sometime! Better me than a paying customer.”

“That’s very clever, actually!” Lee said brightly. “How generous of you. Your students must be very grateful to have you as a teacher.”

“You haven’t seen the flying penis,” Gaara muttered.

Lee’s head snapped around to look at Kankuro’s legs, but he was wearing long black pants, their hems trailing the cement. 

“All right, that’s enough out of you, pipsqueak.” Kankuro held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “You. Shirt off.” He walked around the bench to stand behind Lee. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

Lee’s fingers hesitated on the hem of his shirt. Yet another point of embarrassment to explain away. There was a reason he always wore a shirt in public, even at the gym. “I know I mentioned this during our phone consultation, but the scarring on my back is … rather extensive.” 

“I guarantee you I’ve seen worse,” Kankuro said. “I did medical tattooing as part of my apprenticeship.” 

Lee inhaled deeply to steel himself, then pulled his shirt up and over his head. 

“Holy _shit_ ,” Kankuro hissed to Gaara, reaching out over Lee’s shoulder like he was going to hit his brother and then seeming to remember his sterile gloves at the last moment. “Dude, you said he was a gym teacher, not that he—”

“This is the first time I’ve seen him with his shirt off,” Gaara replied from Lee’s front side, his lips thin and tight. His face had gone bright red, his eyes fixed somewhere above Lee’s navel. 

“Seriously, you guys haven’t even gotten to second base?”

Gaara’s eyes flicked up to glare at his brother for a beat, then right back to Lee’s chest. “What counts as second base for two men?” 

Lee’s heart dropped out of the bottom of his stomach. He felt in that moment very like a specimen, like he had back in the hospital when they brought the PT students in to round during his exercises and to examine his back brace. 

“I’m sorry,” he said to his shoes, interrupting whatever stuttering explanation of the base system Kankuro was giving. “I did try to warn you. If it’s too much trouble …” 

“Oh, no, shit!” Kankuro came around to Lee’s front and bent down to his eyeline, waving his arms frantically. “Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t talking about the scars, man. I swear. They’re not even that bad!” 

Lee chanced a glance over his shoulder at the reflection of his back in the full-length mirror that dominated one side of the room. His spine was splotchy white with the remnants of where the rod had been bolted, a messy patchwork of pink and tan pockmarks climbing the back of his shoulder blade from his skin grafts. The scarring covered most of his trapezius on the left side, ending around his collarbone in the front. 

In his opinion, it was pretty bad. Although his story was a source of personal inspiration, he’d always found the physical effects rather unsightly. They certainly drew a lot of attention from the other patients at rehab, and over time he’d simply learned to cover them to avoid the stares and questions. That was meant to be the whole purpose of the tattoo, to cover up their ugliness with something beautiful and meaningful. 

“If you say so,” he said slowly. 

“I definitely say so!” Kankuro clapped him hard on the shoulder with a gloved hand. “Jeez.” He winced and shook his hand out, then gave Lee a thumbs-up and a wink. “I think I’ve got just the idea.”

Lee had always found that particular pairing of gestures to be trustworthy. It reminded him of Gai-sensei. 

“Really?” he asked, mood already beginning to brighten. “Excellent!” 

“Yeah, why don’t you have a lie-down on the bench and I’ll shave you off then start sketching a bit.” 

The razor work was quick and perfunctory, and afterwards Lee expected Kankuro to pull out a pad of paper and a pencil. Instead he uncapped a marker and began drawing directly onto Lee’s skin. The marker’s tip was cold and faintly ticklish, but Lee endeavored to remain still as best he could.

“You can unclench dude,” Kankuro said after a few minutes. “You’re making my job harder, flexing all those muscles of yours. It really doesn’t matter if you move around for this part.” 

Gaara had pulled up a chair at the head of the tattoo bench, and he reached for one of Lee’s hands and took it. He ran his thumb gently over Lee’s knuckles. It was almost flustering, how quickly Lee relaxed at his soothing touch.

“Okay so far?” he whispered. “If you start getting uncomfortable or if it’s painful, just say the word and Kankuro will stop right away.” 

“I’m fine,” Lee replied just as quietly. Or, at least, he hoped he replied as quietly. He’d been told his voice carried, and Gaara could be extremely soft-spoken when he wanted to be. “It only tickles a little bit.” 

“You’re ticklish.” Gaara arched an eyebrow.

“Please forget I said anything.” 

It wasn’t long until Kankuro stood back and capped his marker, although it might have been a much longer period of time and Lee had simply gotten lost in Gaara’s eyes. 

“All right, ready to get a look at this bad boy?” Kankuro passed Lee a hand mirror. “Go take a peek.”

Lee stood in front of the long mirror on the wall and held up the smaller mirror in his hand to peek over his shoulder. 

What he saw thrilled him. It was more wonderful than he could have even imagined.

“Oh, it’s perfect!” He realized belatedly his fingers were shaking on the mirror’s plastic handle, from adrenaline or woozy gratitude, he couldn’t be sure. “You are truly a genius of your craft!” 

Kankuro stood back and put his hands on his hips with a huff. The self-satisfied smirk that crossed his face then was the first thing that revealed even the slightest hint of family resemblance between himself and Gaara.

“Can I see?” Gaara straightened, leaning from his chair to look at the reflection of Lee’s back in the mirror. 

Lee turned quickly, shielding his back from view. 

“I’d rather you wait, if it’s all the same to you! I want it to be a surprise.”

Gaara narrowed his eyes. “I don’t like surprises.” His gaze shifted to Kankuro. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing!” Kankuro put his hands up defensively.

“If it’s a flying penis …”

“It’s not genitalia!” Lee yelped. “I promise it’s nothing bad! You’ll see!” He hesitated. “Please?” 

Gaara sat back in his chair and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Fine.”

While Kankuro went to change his gloves and prepare his ink, Lee laid back down on the bench. He reached for Gaara’s hand, untangling it from under his elbow, and played with his fingers idly. 

“You won’t look until it’s done, right?” he said quietly. “You promise?”

Gaara glanced up at whatever Kankuro was clattering with, then looked back down at Lee’s face. His mouth formed the soft, subtle line of a smile. “I promise.”

Kankuro returned from the autoclave with his cart and pulled it up beside the bench with a rattling screech. 

“Ready?” He held the tattoo gun up like he was brandishing a weapon. “It’ll sting, but it definitely won’t be as bad as whatever put those scars there in the first place. If you need to move around or sneeze or something, just tell me so I can stop.” 

Lee nodded, steeling himself.

“Okay, face down.”

Lee put his face in the open headrest. Gloved fingers touched his shoulder.

The tattoo gun began to buzz. 

He felt it trailing down his shoulder, vibrating faintly, really no more intense than the original sketching had been. It continued for some time, the sensation so faint and dull it was almost pleasant. It felt a little bit like sitting in a massage chair on its lowest setting.

Gaara squeezed his hand. “Okay?”

Lee looked down at the toes of Gaara’s shoes. “I’m fine. Um, Kankuro?”

“Yeah, man?”

“When are you going to start?”

The gun buzzed to stillness. “I’ve been _started_ for the past fifteen minutes.”

“Oh!” Lee grinned at the floor.

“You’re serious? What’d you think I was doing?” The tattoo gun turned back on, and Lee felt that faint buzzing against his skin again.

“Warming up, maybe?” Lee didn’t shrug, because he didn’t want to ruin Kankuro’s work. “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about tattoos!” 

Kankuro chuckled. “Well, hey, I’m not complaining. The less you hurt, the less you’ll move around.” 

“Right!” Lee focused on remaining very still. It was a little boring, actually, after a while, just the dull sensation of the needle making very small motions across his back. Between the three of them, he was able to keep up a fairly lively conversation, as long as he diverted Gaara and Kankuro from bickering too intensely, but he had never been someone who could sit still for terribly long. Meditation was the part of Gai-sensei’s instructions he’d always been the worst at. His body was just one that wanted to _move_. 

Gradually, he noticed Gaara’s responses growing fainter and further between, his comebacks to his brother’s jibing less snappy and more sluggish. 

“Gaara, are you sleepy?” Lee squeezed gently at the fingers twined with his. “I know you didn’t sleep much last night.”

“I never sleep much,” Gaara responded quickly, but his voice was rather faint.

“If you want to go take a nap in the car, I’ll be fine here.”

“I’m not tired,” he snapped.

“Is it your shoulder? It’s a long time to sit in one place. Do you want to get up and walk around some? Did you bring your medicine?” 

“No,” Gaara’s reply was distinctly high and breathy. His feet shifted on the concrete, toes turning in. “It’s not my shoulder.”

“But something’s wrong!” Lee was about half a second from asking Kankuro to turn off the gun so he could sit up and see Gaara’s face. Something in his gut was screaming. 

“I’m just …” Gaara’s fingers were clammy between Lee’s. “ … a little squeamish. About other people’s blood.”

“I thought you weren’t looking!”

“I’m not,” Gaara breathed. “It’s on your other shoulder. Just a little bit.” 

There was the sensation of rough cloth wiping Lee’s shoulder. That must have been Kankuro. 

“Better, squirt?” His voice was rough when he spoke. 

Gaara exhaled shakily. “Yes.”

“You can go outside if you need to,” Lee offered again. “I promise I’m fine.”

“No.” Gaara sucked in air and braced his feet against the floor. His fingers squeezed Lee’s again, more firmly this time. They were starting to warm again. “I’m here to support you.” 

That tension in his legs began to relax. Soon enough the conversation returned to lighthearted normalcy, Gaara sniping at Kankuro every other sentence.

About halfway through the appointment, Kankuro stood and stretched, switching the gun off. 

“Okay, brick house.” He slapped Lee on his uninked shoulder. “I’m gonna go take a smoke break. Back in fifteen. You can move around a little but don’t touch the tattoo.”

“Brick house?” Lee began to press up on his arms. “What does that mean?”

Kankuro flipped his hood up over his head and shook a cigarette from the pack, making for the back door. “Just that you didn’t move at all.” 

Gaara looked suspiciously at the door that swung shut behind him. “That’s not the definition of ‘brick house’ that I’m familiar with.”

Lee cocked his head and finally sat up. “What definition is that?”

Gaara blinked at him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Mmm.” Lee grunted and swung his arms back and forth at chest level to stretch out his back. He wasn’t sore at all and his skin, while slightly stiff, barely stung. He felt great, actually. “I guess I don’t have much sensation in the scar tissue.” 

Gaara made a soft, breathy noise, somewhere between an inhale and a choke. He was looking at Lee’s chest again. 

Lee glanced down at himself just to make sure he didn’t have an amusing imprint on his skin from the cover of the tattoo bench … or something more embarrassing. There was nothing there, just his bare, slightly hairy skin. 

He looked back up. He imagined Gaara must have gone pale when he was panicking over the sight of Lee’s blood, but his cheeks were flushed pink now. Very faintly, he could smell cigarette smoke trailing under the gap in the back door.

“You should really try to convince your brother to quit smoking,” he said, after it became apparent that Gaara intended to do nothing but sit there silently and watch him stretch. “It’s terrible for his health.”

Gaara snorted. “I can’t even convince him to put his plate in the dishwasher when he’s done with it. I don’t know what you expect me to do about his nicotine addiction.” 

“I have some slides from the health class unit on smoking that I could share with you. Maybe those would help? Although …” Lee pursed his lips. “They’re a little graphic.” 

“He’d probably take them as a challenge.” Gaara rolled his eyes. “Or tattoo them on himself.” 

Seeing the argument wasn’t about to be won, Lee turned instead to toe-touches, then gentle torso twists. He really felt much better than he would have thought. There was an almost electric energy simmering under his skin. It was like being filled up with bubbly light. 

“Is it that uncomfortable?” Gaara asked him, lips thinned to invisibility. He stood from his chair and reached for Lee across the tattoo bench, brushing the front of his shoulder. 

His touch tingled along the line of Lee’s collarbone. 

Lee was unable to stifle the hysterical little giggle that surfaced within him. His blood had become carbonated with giddiness.

“I feel fantastic, actually!” he explained. “I feel like … you know how you feel near the end of a long run, when you can just tell you’re about to beat a personal record?”

Gaara looked down at his own thin legs, at the knobbly ankles jutting from the hems of his pants. “Obviously I don’t.” 

“It feels just like a runner’s high!” Lee exclaimed, suddenly identifying the feeling and its name. “Except I’ve done nothing but lie still for two hours.” 

Gaara’s fingers were still trailing his collarbone, across his chest and down the front of one arm, leaving a trail of sparking sensation in their wake. 

Lee sucked back a breathy laugh.

“Does it tickle?” Gaara’s cool green eyes glanced up from tracing the path of his fingers across Lee’s body to his face. 

“No, it feels …” The air in the shop was cool, and between the circulating eddies of breeze gusting his skin and the frisson of Gaara’s touch, his nipples began to pebble to hardness. “It feels _wonderful_.” 

He leaned across the bench and into Gaara’s touch. He didn’t spare a thought for the fact that he was in the back room of Gaara’s brother’s workplace. 

Gaara’s fingers traced up the line of Lee’s neck, to the sensitive skin behind his ear. He fisted his hand in Lee’s hair and used it to haul him forward into a kiss. 

Gaara’s mouth was blood-warm. His teeth nibbled at Lee’s lower lip, sharp and insistent, until Lee opened his mouth and let him inside. His hand in Lee’s hair sent electricity rocketing down the column of Lee’s spine, the tugging not quite hard enough to hurt but still somehow fierce. Lee’s blood fizzed; his heart fluttered like hummingbird wings. He groped for Gaara’s upper arms and pulled him closer; Gaara scrambled up onto the bench to comply with Lee’s wordless request for proximity. 

A cough sent them jumping apart. 

“Gag,” Kankuro said in complete deadpan. 

Gaara nearly crashed to the floor; Lee caught him at the last minute by the collar of his shirt and set him to rights on solid ground. He completely missed the heated look Gaara gave him as he clapped his hands over his face.

“I am so sorry!” Lee hollered. “We must have gotten carried away with—! I certainly didn’t mean to disrespect your—!”

“Shut your trap,” Kankuro said sharply. “And back up. I gotta re-sanitize the bench since Gaara got his grubby little feet on it.” 

“Lee said he was having a physiological reaction to the tattoo process,” Gaara explained, as Kankuro began wiping down the bench with a white cloth that reeked of alcohol. “Like a runner’s high.”

Kankuro tossed the rag and went to wash his hands again. The combination of the acrid stink of the sanitizing solution on the bench and the nicotine fog in Kankuro’s clothes made Lee’s nose wrinkle.

“Yeah, that’ll happen,” he drawled. “Adrenaline rush. It’s just your body processing the pain of being stabbed roughly a million times. Don’t get any crazy ideas.” He turned to Lee with a keen look in his eye, snapping his gloves back on. He sat down and activated the tattoo gun with sadistic relish. “You’ll probably crash hard later.” 

Lee couldn’t imagine ever coming down from this feeling, he thought to himself, laying back down on the bench. He felt as if he were floating in a cloud of ozone just before a thunderstorm, every part of his body hissing with electricity. 

But just as Kankuro had predicted, the feeling gradually faded. By the time the gun’s buzzing had descended to the base of his spine, he was feeling rather achy and irritable. 

“All right.” Kankuro pulled the gun back with a little flourish and sat back. “Linework’s all set. Ready to take a look?”

Lee nearly leapt to his feet. Any grouchiness he’d felt evaporated in a flash as Kankuro passed him the hand mirror again. 

He held the mirror up to look at his back. His heart sped right back up into that electric feeling. 

Gaara climbed to his feet and crossed to peer over Lee’s shoulder. 

A dragon’s long, scaly body wound up the column of his spine, its whiskered face ending just at his shoulder blade. But instead of covering the path of his scars as Lee had originally requested, Kankuro’s design climbed between and around them, incorporating their shapes flawlessly into the design but obscuring not a one. The dragon’s claws seemed to dig into the deepest scars and use them as scaffolding as it climbed. The once-ugly spray of scars across his shoulder now looked as if they were bursting from the dragon’s mouth, like the clouds of the storms the dragon was meant to bring. 

“It’s _beautiful_ ,” Lee breathed out. Then he promptly burst into tears. 

“Whoa, whoa, no waterworks!” Kankuro waved his hands. “Those better be happy tears!”

“They are!” Lee said wetly, swiping at his running nose and eyes. 

Gaara came down off his tiptoes to look Lee in the eye. His eyes had an openness in them, the curve of his mouth very soft. 

“You’re right,” he whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

Lee just sobbed harder. 

He barely managed to collect himself for long enough for Kankuro to swaddle his back in plastic wrap and hand him a little sheet of paper with his aftercare instructions. He cried all throughout the process of paying (and tipping generously) and scheduling his first color appointment for the following month. 

He was still rubbing his now scratchy, red eyes as Gaara lowered the back of the passenger seat in Lee’s car. He would be driving Lee home, since Lee wasn’t supposed to apply any friction to the ink for at least forty-eight hours. Nor was he supposed to exercise, which Lee expected would be the much greater challenge. Kankuro had told him that after two days he could ease back into his workouts, but, “Nothing too intense, and nothing that’ll get ya too sweaty.” Lee despaired of thinking of an aspect of his typical daily routine that couldn’t be characterized as either _intense_ or _sweaty_ , or, usually, both. Perhaps just some light jogging and yoga. 

“Are you happy with it?” Gaara asked, climbing into the driver’s seat. “You’re really not upset?” 

“No,” Lee sniffed, setting himself very gingerly into the passenger seat and being sure to lean forward. The seatback was nearly touching the back row, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He didn’t want to risk ruining the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

Or, well, he amended, looking at Gaara’s gentle, worried expression. Maybe the second most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

“I’m elated,” he reassured him, reaching across the console to cup Gaara’s soft, round cheek. “I promise. I’ve never been happier.” 

Gaara’s eyes slitted with a feline pleasure. “Good.” 

It was easy, then, to lean across the gear shift and kiss him, slow and soft and sweet. 

Lee’s back was slick with lotion and tacky with plastic wrap, and beneath that his body was starting to complain rather loudly that it needed to rest. But Lee had never been one to bend to his body’s whims, and right now Gaara was climbing up onto his knees to lean closer into Lee’s space, tightening his hands on Lee’s biceps, making the quietest breathy sounds Lee had ever heard. 

Lee stroked a thumb along the line of Gaara’s cheekbone. He kissed him more deeply, exploring the shapes of his teeth, the texture of his tongue, seeking more of those rare and fragile sounds. Gaara responded with a chorus of wet sighs. He kissed Lee back with increasing force, shouldering closer, hands skating down Lee’s bare chest. 

He traced the shapes of Lee’s abdomen with his fingers. Lee shuddered. Did this count as second base? It was no matter; he would invent a whole new system of bases just for the two of them. 

Lee reached for the hem of Gaara’s shirt and tugged it. The fabric was worn and thin, the print of the logo faded and cracking. Lee suspected Gaara must have owned it since at least high school, though it still seemed to fit him fine. The skin of Gaara’s stomach beneath was soft, the hair on his lower abdomen thicker and coarser than the hair on his head. Lee dragged his nails through it and felt Gaara shiver against his lips. 

Gaara sat back with his hands on the hem of his own shirt, looking like he was about to tug it off. 

Then he froze. 

He jerked backwards and went nowhere. He did it again, a strange, squirming motion. 

It was then that Lee realized Gaara’s belt loop was stuck on the parking brake. 

Their eyes widened simultaneously as the knowledge dawned on them.

“Um,” Lee said articulately.

Gaara twisted this way and that, fingers groping at his waistband fruitlessly.

“It’s—” He growled under his breath. “ _Fuck_. Goddamnit, god fucking damnit.”

“Just hold still,” Lee soothed him, reaching himself for the point on which Gaara had become snared. “Let me see if I—” The fabric of the loop had slipped down into the gap between the emergency brake and its housing, the sharp edge of it snarled on the stitching. “Can you just—” He pushed at Gaara’s hip, trying to shift him so he could get a better grip. 

“Ow,” Gaara hissed.

Lee jerked his hands back as if burned. “Are you okay?”

“Just my shoulder.” Gaara let go of his entrapped belt loop to rub at it. 

“Okay, stop messing with it.” Lee’s mouth crumpled with concentration. “Just let me handle it.”

There was no give of the fabric to get his fingers beneath, so all he could do was push at it with his blunt nails. His fingers sweated, the fabric and plastic quickly becoming damp and slick. 

“It’s not—” He pushed harder, seeming to finally find a bit of friction.

The parking brake creaked warningly.

“I don’t think I can do it without breaking my car.” He sat back with a sigh, rubbing his slippery hands down his face. 

Gaara wriggled a bit, clearly uncomfortable. There was a thin wrinkle between his pale, sparse brows. “Do you have any scissors?” 

“In my car?” Lee shook his head. “No, not even in the First Aid kit.” 

Gaara kissed his teeth. “We have to call for help.”

“I don’t think that we do!” Lee’s body flushed with panic. “Just let me try one more time!”

But Gaara had already grabbed his phone off the dashboard and tapped one of his contacts. 

Lee quieted his protests as he heard the phone ring faintly through the speaker, but his fingers continued to work at Gaara’s belt loop and the brake, pushing and pulling at scrabbling at it to no avail whatsoever.

“Hello, Kankuro?” Gaara’s voice was uninflected, as if he were simply calling for takeout or dismissing a telemarketer. “No, Lee’s fine. We have a small situation out here. Can you come out to Lee’s car? And bring scissors.”

He hung up before Lee could think of the words to object. 

“Quit messing with it,” Gaara scolded him. “He’ll be right out.”

“But that will ruin your pants!” Lee’s fingers worked all the more desperately. 

“It’s a belt loop, Lee. It’s fine. I can sew it up later.”

“You can sew?” 

Gaara’s eyes darted over Lee’s shoulder.

“Here he comes,” he announced. “Maybe if I just take my pants off I can get loose.” 

Heat rushed through Lee’s limbs with staggering intensity. Just then, he got the slightest bit of traction on the fabric. He pulled as hard as he could.

There was the sound of ripping denim.

Gaara’s belt loop tore clean off his pants, taking about six inches of fabric with it. 

“I tore your pants!” Lee shrieked.

Behind him, he heard someone knocking on the car window. He reeled around, but not before he noticed that the front of Gaara’s shredded pants had a distinct bulge to them. Odd, Lee was sure he hadn’t had an erection just moments ago, and he’d been looking at the front of Gaara’s pants for the past several minutes. 

Kankuro was standing outside the car with a pair of scissors in one hand and a look of spectacular dismay on his face.

Lee cracked the door.

“Um, hello again!” He aimed for a tone of casual cheer and missed it utterly. “We seem to have resolved the problem. Thank you for coming to Gaara’s rescue!”

Kankuro blinked once, then again. His mouth opened, shut, opened. “Huh,” he said, seeming to finally find his voice. “Ripped the pants right off him, huh?” 

The flush that had been heating Lee’s skin drained in an instant. “We were not—! Um, _I_ was not, rather—! It was merely—!”

“You can leave now,” Gaara said flatly. He’d sat back and now leaned against the driver’s side door, arms crossed over his chest, closed-off.

“Huh-uh.” Kankuro shook his head. “Nothin’ doin’. I can’t let you drive home like that. What if you get pulled over with the greased-up cover of Gay Sports Illustrated here, and you with your pants looking like a werewolf got to ‘em? I’m not bailing you out of jail for public indecency. C’mon, out, both of ya. Back in the shop.”

He gestured brusquely and spun on his heel. 

Lee had no choice but to climb shamefaced out of the car and hurry after him. Gaara followed all the more sedately, primly pinching shut the torn length of his pants, which stretched from the now-detached belt loop nearly to his knee. 

Lee found himself sitting awkwardly on a plastic chair back at Kankuro’s station while Gaara sat on the bench in his boxers, swinging his legs. His underwear had little cacti printed on them, although Lee was trying very hard not to look. This was not how the first time seeing Gaara with his pants off was supposed to go. It wouldn’t be appropriate to look when he hadn’t even been given proper permission. 

The skin of Gaara’s calves was very pale, stippled with fine hair and marked pink from the seam of his too-tight jeans. There were purple-green bruises on both his knees. Lee turned his head away. 

There were no words for the mortification that accompanied sitting shirtless next to your pantsless boyfriend while his brother glared unholy death at you down the length of a sewing needle. Kankuro was hardly looking at the fabric at all, glower fixed solely on Lee’s face as he stabbed at the denim with increasing vigor.

“Kankuro,” Gaara said lowly. “I don’t need you to scare him off. He was being a perfect gentleman.” 

Kankuro’s gaze snapped to his brother; the intensity of his scowl did not diminish. “You have a crazy fucking idea of what a gentleman is.” 

“I am truly sorry!” Lee blurted. “I did not mean to—!”

“You, shut up.” Kankuro pointed at Lee with the needle as if the million tiny stab wounds he’d given him earlier hadn’t been enough and now he was itching to give him a few more. “Give me one good reason not to tattoo ‘panty-ripper’ on your back the next time you’re in my chair.”

“I promise I was not being aggressive or rough with him!” Lee squeaked. “I just didn’t want you to know that we were kissing!” 

He clapped a hand over his mouth in embarrassment. Better not to remind Kankuro how they had been defiling the parking lot of his workplace. 

Kankuro’s mouth thinned to a line. Even the snakebite piercings on his lip seemed to be staring Lee down with judgmental scrutiny. “Really? _Just_ kissing?”

Gaara’s hands tensed on the edge of the tattoo bench. The fabric squeaked. He leaned forward, interrupting the line of sight between Kankuro and Lee. 

“That’s all it was at the time,” he said, with a serenity that balanced on a knife’s edge. Inches from his brother’s face, he seemed to wait, unblinking. 

Kankuro was the one who finally lost the staring contest, flicking his eyes up in a roll and returning to his task. “Whatever.” 

Gaara sat back with a look of self-satisfaction, crossing his ankle over his knee. The hem of his boxers slipped slightly higher on his skinny thighs. There were pouches of soft, unmuscled flesh there, spreading against the black plasticine. 

Lee clenched his fists and tried to think of the most routine, boring things he could imagine. The sixth lap of an eight-lap track run, the hum of dryers as he folded laundry at the laundromat, the smell of mildewed towels in the gym locker room. 

“Besides,” Gaara said, with a slow, reptilian blink. “If I want to have sex with Lee, that’s my business.” 

And now all Lee could think of was sweat dripping down the column of a pale neck from exertion, shorts in desperate need of washing wrinkled from friction, bare skin exposed as shirts rose over heads. He wondered if Gaara would be willing to come work out with him. Probably not. He could still ask. The sound of a body slammed up against a locker rang in his mind as if it were more than fantasy. Shower steam seemed to fill his vision. He could hear panting, loud in his ears.

Oh, that was his own heavy breathing. 

He tucked his thumbs into his fists and braced his hands hard to distract himself. 

“We should, um,” he said weakly, “probably talk about that first.” 

And there should be low lighting. Romance. Flower petals on the turned-down bed. No open flames, obviously, given Gaara’s track record, but perhaps battery-powered tea lights. Mood music. Very careful negotiation and discussion of boundaries and crystal-clear consent. 

Not … not a rough tumble in his car in a parking lot in broad daylight. No matter how often their dalliances seemed to keep straying that direction. 

Gaara’s eyes flickered to his. They were soft, his expression considering. He smiled without moving his mouth, just the slightest wrinkle of his eyes upward, the soft skin beneath them pouching. 

“Of course,” he said. “It’s your business, too.” 

Kankuro groaned. Lee startled; he’d nearly forgotten Gaara’s brother was there. 

“I didn’t think I’d need to bring this up, since you two said you were taking things slow—”

“I didn’t say that,” Gaara corrected him.

“You said you hadn’t even seen him with his shirt off!” 

Gaara huffed. “I have now.” 

Kankuro pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, rubbing it irritably. “I’m not even touching the fact that you guys apparently used my job—where I _work_!—for your weird foreplay. But listen.” He tied the knot of the thread and snapped it with his fingers, turning to point at Lee with the needle again. Lee quailed. “Sex counts as physical activity. Obviously. 2 weeks minimum before you get that thing sweaty or frictiony. I’m not gonna feel bad if your ink bleeds because you were in a rush to deflower my baby brother.”

“D-deflower?”

* * *

Two weeks later almost to the second found Gaara standing outside Lee’s apartment door. 

Lee rushed to welcome him inside with a hug and a bouquet of flowers that he pressed into Gaara’s arms as soon as he released him.

“I made you a card!” Lee exclaimed, thrusting the envelope at him. 

Gaara took it, though he was still studying the flowers idly. “Peonies.” He pressed his face to the pink blossoms and inhaled. “They smell nice.” 

“I’m glad! The lady at the shop said they were a good choice for a romantic date, so I—”

Gaara glanced up at Lee over the edge of the bouquet. “I brought condoms and lube. And a change of clothes.” 

There was, indeed, a plastic shopping bag hanging from his elbow with a shirtsleeve dangling from it.

“Oh.” Lee’s heart slithered out of his chest and began beating somewhere below his navel. He was suddenly immensely grateful for the fact that Tenten and Neji had agreed to go out for the evening, if they were going to have this conversation in the middle of the hallway in front of … well, nobody, technically, but it still _felt_ very public. “Um, I … I have those things, too. You didn’t have to—”

“What’s the card for?” Gaara turned his attention to the little envelope, running his thumb beneath the flap to unseal it. 

“It’s an apology card! For last time. I had to make it myself.” Lee laughed, uncomfortable, and tried to rub the heat from the back of his neck. “I can’t believe they didn’t have anything at the drugstore that was appropriate. Surely it can’t be that uncommon an experience.”

Gaara pulled the card from the envelope and held it up to his eyeline. The front read, in glitter glue, **SORRY ABOUT YOUR PANTS ACCIDENT**. 

He opened it and began to read aloud. “‘I am so terribly sorry that I ripped your pants in half. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength. I only wanted to defend your honor. I hope your brother isn’t too angry with us. I only want to treat you with the greatest respect and admiration. I promise it will not happen again.’ Yeah.” He glanced up at Lee, then back down at the card. “I’m not surprised they don’t make pre-printed cards for this.” 

Lee decided not to acknowledge the heavy note of sarcasm that underlied Gaara’s words. 

“I thought you weren’t going to be able to stay the night.” He gestured to the overstuffed bag in Gaara’s hand. “Why did you bring extra clothes?”

“Oh.” Gaara inhaled sharply. He took a step forward, fully in Lee’s space now. The look in his eyes was heated. “I wanted you to do what you did last time.” 

“Huh?” Lee’s brain was working molasses-slow, distracted by Gaara’s proximity. His shirt collar was in a high v-shape, the dip of his throat pronounced. He wanted to lick it. He pressed a kiss to the corner of Gaara’s mouth because he couldn’t not be kissing him in that moment. 

“In the car,” Gaara whispered, sidling closer. 

Lee’s hands found his waistband. Either his shirt was a little too short or his pants a bit too low, because there was the thinnest line of bare skin in the gap between them. Lee’s fingers pushed his shirt up and made that strip of skin wider. His thumbs rubbed circles on Gaara’s hipbones. 

Gaara sighed, pushing in closer. He tilted his head up to kiss Lee’s jaw with the hint of teeth, shifting his hips meaningfully within Lee’s grasp.

“Oh.” It dawned on Lee suddenly. “You mean when I broke my parking brake.” He swallowed audibly and felt his Adam’s apple surge up and down his throat. “We’re going to crush your flowers.”

Gaara pulled back just long enough to set them on the kitchen table with the handmade card. Then he was back in Lee’s arms, his small hands on Lee’s shoulders, rubbing up and down his upper arms.

“Will you?” he murmured to the corner of Lee’s mouth, between soft kisses that were growing harder and more heated.

“Will I … rip your clothes?” Gaara’s breath when he hummed his agreement smelled like strong coffee. The shadows beneath his eyes were stark; Lee suspected he hadn’t slept much the previous night, if at all. There were many hopes he had for this night, but one of them was wearing Gaara out enough that he might get—if not a full night’s sleep—at least a good nap out of it. “I don’t want to ruin them. That seems wasteful.”

“It’s fine. They’re Kankuro’s old clothes.” That explained why they were so ill-fitting, though Lee could not imagine bulky, stocky Kankuro ever fitting into the small shirt he had now fully rucked up over Gaara’s belly. They must have been very old clothes indeed. 

“That’s even worse!” Gaara had at some point insinuated his leg between Lee’s knees, and he was using his position to slowly walk Lee backwards up the hall. “Then I will just be thinking about your brother!” 

Gaara frowned slightly, just a twitch of his lips down and a narrowing of his eyes. 

“I can change into my clothes instead,” he offered.

“Then what will you wear home?” 

“You can lend me some pajamas.” 

Tempting. The mental image of Gaara in too-long soft cotton sleeves, his thin knees under the hems of Lee’s favorite silky jogging shorts pushed eagerly into Lee’s mind. 

“How about this?” His fingertips found the dips in the small of Gaara’s back and stroked there. He desperately wanted Gaara to enjoy himself, but he also didn’t want to do anything that would cross his own boundaries. He had already compromised his initial impulses significantly by agreeing to top their first time, and even then only because he wasn’t supposed to be rubbing his back against the bed quite yet. He was very concerned about _hurting_ Gaara, about the chronic tension in his shoulder and how it might react to such vigorous activity. And about the fact that this would be Gaara’s first time, which in Lee’s estimation meant he didn’t know what his preferences would be yet, if he would even _like_ being the receptive partner. Lee had even offered to be on his knees, but Gaara had refused to even entertain the idea of any position where they weren’t face-to-face. “We’ll just get undressed normally this time, and then, if you decide you want to do this again, we can discuss how to incorporate your, um …”

“Fantasy?” Gaara suggested.

Lee’s breath left him all in a rush. “That. For next time. If you end up wanting there to be a next time.” 

Gaara had stopped walking, and Lee realized it was probably because he didn’t know which of the three bedroom doors along the hall belonged to Lee. Lee took his hand and led him to the closed door at the end of the hall, the one with the word **YOUTH!** emblazoned on a bright green pennant hanging from the doorknob.

In retrospect, it should not have been difficult for Gaara to guess. Lee didn’t linger over the thought. 

As he opened the door, he felt Gaara’s hands on his shoulders from behind. He went up on his tiptoes to whisper in Lee’s ear.

“I’m already planning on there being a next time. There are so many more things I want to try.”

Lee went shivery with anticipation. Best not to count those chickens, yet, though. It wasn’t his first time doing this, but it had been … a long time. Better to see if he lived up to Gaara’s expectations first. Gaara had tried to reassure him, during their earlier, stilted conversation, that he didn’t _have_ any expectations, but … Well. There were a lot of things about the real world—about himself specifically—that didn’t quite stand up to the test of imagination. He didn’t want to disappoint, but he was sure that in some way he would. 

He led Gaara into his bedroom. He hadn’t been able to quite do everything he had wanted for the perfect first time he’d envisioned. For one, his bed wasn’t a romantic four-poster hanging with drapes. Although perhaps it was better that his box spring touched the floor in its frame. That way if they fell out of the bed—and they very well might, with Gaara’s luck being how it was—at least he wouldn’t be too badly injured. Candles had been an obvious no-go, and Tenten had wisely pointed out that flower petals might be a precarious choice, too. Suppose Gaara discovered mid-act that he had an allergy to the pollen?

Instead, Lee had strung the wall behind the head of his bed with fairy lights, their faint glow obscuring the fact that his room was not so much _decorated_ as it was stacked high with gym detritus and school papers, though he’d done his best to tidy everything away. The plain white sheets looked soft-edged and romantic in the gold light. A scented air freshener wafted a pleasant light scent of roses through the room. 

“Um, tada?” He held his hands out and turned.

Behind him, Gaara had already pulled his shirt off and tossed it on the floor.

There was a bruise the size of a handspan across his ribs, an angry red mark striping its center. 

“What _happened?_ ” Lee gasped. He barely refrained from running his fingers along the edges of the wound.

Gaara’s brow furrowed before he followed the path of Lee’s gaze. “I walked into the oven door at work,” he said, looking down at his own torso as if just remembering the injury was there, “while it was open.” 

“Are you sure you’re okay to—? That is, I mean, this is … physically strenuous. I wouldn’t want you to—”

“Lee,” Gaara cut him off. “If we don’t have sex tonight, I might end up chafing my dick right off.” 

“What?”

Gaara made a single, slow, extremely illustrative jerking gesture. “Masturbating?” 

“You—” Lee gawped at him. “You’ve … been thinking about this. During your, um, private intimacy?” 

Gaara’s eyes traced Lee’s body from his bare toes clenching on the wood floor all the way up to his blushing face, tactile as a full-body caress. 

“Every night for the past three months.” He came closer. His hands found the buttons of Lee’s shirt and began undoing them from the bottom-up, his fingers slipping beneath the fabric to trace cool touches along Lee’s stomach. “Sometimes several times a night.” 

That was … Lee exhaled shakily. Okay. That was a lot to take in. The specter of expectation loomed from the corners of Lee’s mind.

There was no good response to such a confession, so he cupped the back of Gaara’s head and wound his fingers through his coarse hair. God, he was so beautiful like this, all warm light and deep shadows, the smell of bitter coffee grounds and freshly turned soil. He must have just been out in the garden before he came over. The skin on the back of his neck was warm, maybe slightly sunburnt. 

Lee dropped his eyes and searched Gaara’s pale shoulder for his scar. It took a moment to find it; it was a very subtle, silvery white and not particularly large, but the skin around it was sunken and lacking muscle, as if a chunk of him had been excavated. Lee supposed that might have been the case. When he trailed his fingers along the back of Gaara’s shoulder, though, he found the exit wound, broad and rough and ropy with tissue. He stroked along its edges, right where the dead nerves would have come to life, and heard Gaara hiss. 

He pulled Gaara close and kissed him, soft and slow and eager. He turned them and walked them back to the low bed, depositing Gaara among the extra pillows he’d snatched off the living room couch for just this occasion. He positioned him carefully before he climbed atop him, fluffing and smoothing the pillows beneath Gaara’s upper body until Gaara kneed his side and grumbled for him to get on with it.

“I just don’t want you to be in any pain,” Lee stammered.

Gaara scoffed. “I took a double dose of my painkillers.”

“That’s medically unwise—”

Gaara hooked an ankle around the back of Lee’s knees and yanked him forward.

And yes, it was awkward. How could it not have been? Gaara tore the first condom they pulled out of the box, trying to rip the foil with his teeth. And Lee felt more than a little ridiculous when Gaara planted his heel on the lube bottle and turned the wood floor into a slip-and-slide, though he was grateful then that Gaara had thought to make his own drugstore run; the extra bottle certainly came in handy. And sure, he groaned when later he planted his foot on the floor for leverage only to skid forward and crack his head against Gaara’s. And of course, naturally the dent in the plaster where the crown of Gaara’s head bumped the wall after a particularly hard thrust was going to be as much of a pain to patch as it would be to explain to his roommates why they might not be getting the security deposit back. 

But it was also, strangely … sort of perfect. Gaara’s thin skin was black and blue with bruises in every stage of healing, and Lee kissed every last one. His legs writhed in the sheets and his bony knees knocked Lee’s hips, leaving bruises of their own. He made sounds so high and breathy that Lee would gladly sacrifice the rest of his hearing to listen to nothing but those noises for the rest of his life. And all throughout, he kept kissing Lee with his eyes open, touching him gently, almost reverently all along the edges of his fading scars and fresh ink, staring at him with a sort of wide-eyed awe that made Lee’s soul turn to warm liquid. 

Even afterwards—when their sorry-for-bumping-your-noggin apology shower blowjob turned into a shameful phone call to Tenten begging for instructions on how to repair a broken shower curtain rod—Lee remained in that state of near-grace, bordering on ecstasy. 

“Do you still want to do this again?” he whispered to the wet shell of Gaara’s pink ear. The water still ran in the shower, spattering on the torn shower curtain, its plastic buckled with fingernail marks. He’d even rip Gaara’s clothes off if he wanted. He’d pick him up and hold him against the wall again, too, as long as they were on dry, non-skid ground. He held up a towel and considered whether it would fit to wrap around them both. 

“Yes.” Gaara grabbed his chin and turned Lee’s face to his mouth for another kiss, the breath between them wet with steam. The towel fell to the floor, forgotten. “Yes, obviously, yes.” 

“Are you even listening to me?” Tenten barked over the speakerphone. “I’m going to be home in 30 minutes, and if there’s a hole in the drywall, I’m sending you _and_ lover boy to the hardware store, no matter what you are or aren’t wearing!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, [GaaLee Bingo](https://gaalee-bingo.tumblr.com) is open for prompts starting today! Please go send in some prompts for the bingo cards!


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